KJP: "The one person who is sowing chaos is Governor Abbott"

AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

Do tell, Karine. Do tell.

The Biden administration formally filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas Monday. DOJ announced a lawsuit was imminent if Governor Abbott didn’t meet a Monday deadline to remove the buoy barrier in the Rio Grande River in the Eagle Pass area. Governor Abbott did not blink.

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White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre (KJP) was asked about the Biden border crisis. Naturally, she blamed Governor Abbott for the “chaos.”

As Governor Abbott said on Monday evening, it’s telling that the only person Biden has sued over the porous southern border and all that has happened due to the president’s dereliction of duty is the governor of a border state who is trying to secure the border as best he can. Texas taxpayers (including me) are paying for Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s border security initiative he launched in 2021 when the border situation went out of control. As soon as Biden took office, he signed executive orders ending policies and agreements with Mexico that worked well during the previous administration to keep illegal immigration at a manageable level. The rest is history.

KJP lies when she says Abbott is undermining the administration’s policies. The administration has no real policies. There are parole programs that allow 30,000 illegal immigrants from specific countries each month to come in, which is not slowing down the numbers. She claims that the numbers are the lowest they have been in two years. That’s a low bar, Ms. Jean-Pierre, because the numbers over the last three years, the years since Biden has been in the White House, reached historic highs. They reached numbers that would have been unimaginable if it was not reality. Joe Biden’s refusal to secure the southern border – his primary responsibility being to protect the homeland – is reason enough for impeachment. There is no country without secure borders. We’ve lost our sovereignty.

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The move was expected after Abbott made clear to President Joe Biden in a letter earlier in the day that he would not remove the barriers and blamed the White House for making him have to take action on the border.

“The fact is, if you would just enforce the immigration laws Congress already has on the books, America would not be suffering from your record-breaking level of illegal immigration,” the Republican wrote.

The photo used above was taken the one time Biden visited the border – Abbott met him on the tarmac in El Paso. Abbott gave him that white paper in his hand, a letter that explained ways to secure the border with Mexico. It was a wasted effort but it highlighted the fact that Abbott tried to get help and was ignored by this administration.

The point that Abbott was making to Biden is that even if Congress continues to ignore immigration law reform, and they will, there are steps that Biden can take on his own that will improve the crisis he created. He wants the chaos, though, and the flood of brown and black people that he thinks will become Democrat voters.

The Justice Department says Abbott violated the federal Rivers and Harbors Act, which requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ approval before any barriers can be placed in any navigable water in the United States. Abbott and the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has overseen the project, did not get prior approval from the Army Corps of Engineers.

“This floating barrier poses a risk to navigation, as well as public safety, in the Rio Grande River, and it presents humanitarian concerns,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement announcing the suit. “Additionally, the presence of the floating barrier has prompted diplomatic protests by Mexico and risks damaging U.S. foreign policy.”

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Governor Abbott points out in his response to the lawsuit that the only barrier is to illegal immigration.

In his letter Monday, Abbott denied that anything Texas has done has violated the Rivers and Harbors Act. And the governor argued that the buoy barrier the state is putting in the river is deterring migrants from entering the Rio Grande.

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