Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Sunday that his state’s border with Mexico is so porous that ‘more than 20,000’ illegal immigrants have crossed it since January 1.
The startling claim comes as congressional Republicans are pushing hard against President Obama’s ‘executive amnesty’ plan that would mainstream more than 5 million people who are in the U.S. illegally.
‘We all saw what happened on the Texas border last summer, but we need to understand that the problem is not going away,’ Abbott said on the CBS show ‘Face the Nation.’
‘Already this calendar year, since January 1, we have had more than 20,000 people come across the border, apprehended, unauthorized. And so we have an ongoing problem on the border that Congress must step up and solve.’
Obama’s plan that he announced in November doesn’t apply to illegal immigrants who entered the U.S. in the last five years.
The president outlined his intentions four months ago and framed them as an effort to reprioritize scarce Homeland Security Department resources in a way that focused more on new border-crossers and less on people the White House sees as otherwise law-abiding residents.
‘If you plan to enter the U.S. illegally, your chances of getting caught and sent back just went up,’ Obama said Nov. 20.
But that message hasn’t percolated into the communities of Mexicans and Central Americans who are desperate for what they believe is a free ticket to live in America without fear of deportation.
That’s the deal Obama has offered to a larger but different group of people, including countless hundreds of thousands of adults who have had children after sneaking into the United States.
He is also promising them work permits and Social Security numbers, something the GOP fears will be impossible to roll back once it’s in place.
A federal judge agreed last week, calling a halt to the entire process.
At the same time, the Obama administration says it stopped 213,719 people from taking up residence in the U.S. illegally last year.
Most, however, get through a loose net of border security that then-governor Rick Perry augmented with his own armed Department of Public Safety officers last year.
Abbott said he will up the ante with ‘more than 500 more Department of Public Safety officers, more Texas Rangers, more technology. We are coming out of our own pocket, Texas taxpayers’ pockets, to secure the border and doing the job that the federal government must do.’
More than 800,000 ilegal immigrants currently live in Texas, though.
‘You don’t have enough buses to send them back to Mexico, and I don’t expect you can put all of them in jail,’ CBS host Bob Schieffer asked Abbott on Sunday. ‘What are you going to do with them?’
‘Well, two things,’ the governor said. ‘One is, the president himself said as these people were coming across the border that he would repatriate them as soon as possible. So, we need to see whether or not the president himself is going to live up to the commitment that he made.’
The second part, he said, is up to federal lawmakers: ‘We need Congress to have the latitude to fulfill its responsibility to solve the problem.’
House Republicans say they’ve done thir part, passing a Homeland Security budget that strengthens border controls and zeroes out what they call Obama’s ‘executive amnesty.’
House Speaker John Boehner castigated Senate Democrats this month for blocking the measure on the other side of the U.S. Capitol, saying they need to ‘get up off their a** and do something.’
Don’t be fooled by Boehner… he’s not really doing anything to stop Amnesty. The Democrats are actively blocking the measure that would stop it. Both sides of the aisle are in this together against the American people. It’s astonishing. They are facilitating a coup in front of our eyes and the destruction of the Republic. Just how isn’t all of this treason? They all need to get off their collective a**’ and do something. But they won’t – they are all Progressives and want a Progressive majority rule along with cheap labor. America has been betrayed by her own leaders on the left and the right. Obama won’t stop unless we stop him. We had better do it soon. Time’s almost up.