The first bus carrying migrants from the Texas-Mexico border to Washington, D.C., arrived Wednesday morning, conveniently dropping the Colombians, Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans off in front of Fox News’s studios on Capitol Hill.
It was a great publicity stunt, as it allowed Washington reporters to see up close how these migrants are simply being released into the country to go wherever they want, with only a vague hope that they will report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials when they reach their final destinations.
Even if most of these migrants show up for initial court appearances to assert asylum as a defense against deportation, does anyone really believe they’ll show up voluntarily to be deported after they lose their cases, as most of them will? And when they are denied asylum, does anyone believe the Biden administration will track them down, arrest them, and deport them.
Of course not — which is exactly why so many are coming.
But the far more ambitious part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s response to the border crisis unfolded Wednesday afternoon in Laredo, Texas. Gov. Abbott held a joint press conference with Samuel Alejandro Garcia Sepulveda, who is the governor of Nuevo Leon, a state in Mexico that borders Texas, to announce a new agreement between the two states. Abbott would end the “enhanced safety inspections” he had started earlier in the week on the Colombia-Solidarity International Bridge. In exchange, Garcia promised “to prevent illegal immigration from Nuevo Leon into Texas.” In short, Abbott is trying to do the job at the border that President Joe Biden refuses to do.
It is too early to tell if Garcia will follow through on his end of the bargain, but there is a well-established history of border crises being solved by United States-Mexico cooperation.
Eight years ago, President Barack Obama agreed to pay Mexico $100 million to step up its immigration enforcement to help end the 2014 migrant crisis. Then-Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto announced “Programa Frontera Sur,” which heavily increased the number of border agents on Mexico’s southern border and the number of mobile checkpoints throughout his country.
The stepped-up enforcement worked right up until the far-Left President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was elected in December 2018 on a promise to not “continue the dirty work” of doing America’s border enforcement. Obrador then ended Frontera Sur, paving the way for the 2019 border crisis.
As Gov. Abbott is doing now, former President Donald Trump utilized trade with Mexico (in the form of threatened tariffs) as leverage to induce Mexican cooperation on immigration enforcement. Trump’s deal with Obrador resulted in the Remain in Mexico program, which was wildly successful in ending the 2019 border crisis.
Biden ended Remain in Mexico on his first day in office, choosing instead to rely on a selectively enforced Title 42 COVID-19 policy that let unaccompanied minors and families into the U.S., but not adults without children.
Biden’s ending of Remain in Mexico and selective enforcement of Title 42 caused a deluge of migrants in 2021, leading to a record two million arrests for illegal entry at the southern border last year.
Now, with Title 42 ending completely on May 23, Gov. Abbott has been forced to take the security of our southern border into his own hands.
It is Biden who should be pressuring Mexico to restore the Remain in Mexico program and bring order back to the southern border. But he has completely failed in his duty to enforce our nation’s immigration laws faithfully.
So, now, Abbott is stepping up where Biden has refused to lead. Abbott is still implementing his “enhanced safety inspections” at major ports of entry in the other three Mexican states that border Texas. And his office says they are currently in negotiations with those states, looking to strike deals such as the one Texas struck with Nuevo Leon.
It would be nice if we had a president that was this committed to working with Mexico to end the migrant crisis at our southern border. But we don’t, so Abbott is playing the hand he was dealt. It’s a risky play, but he is trying to make the best of it. Everyone who cares about the security of our southern border should be hoping he pulls it off.
