Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has launched a new stage of his campaign to make himself look like a credible future presidential candidate by subverting the Constitution just a little bit, sending units of the Texas National Guard to lay concertina wire along the Texas-New Mexico state line. Abbott tweeted out photos of Texas Guard members deploying the wire along the state border near Sunland Park, New Mexico, which is adjacent to to El Paso in Texas and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico and is, despite your American education, a US state. The new razor wire barrier stretches north where the Texas and New Mexico border lines intersect the Rio Grande, which forms the US-Mexico boundary.
Abbott claimed the new murderwire was needed to keep migrants from crossing the river into New Mexico — US America — and heading east into Texas.
Now don’t you ladies get all worried; there’s no conceivable way (Ha! Ha!) that this could turn into an effort to prevent Texas women from sneaking into the free state of New Mexico to get a legal abortion. Why, that’s every bit as paranoid as the idea that the Supreme Court would just arbitrarily ignore decades of “settled law” by overturning Roe v. Wade. If you can’t take federal judges at their word during their confirmation hearings, then you might even start worrying about the Court tossing out the very well-established right of folks to travel freely from one state to another.
In any case, that right only applies to good people, so obviously it shouldn’t get in the way of Abbott’s new Bobwire Wall, or the machine-gun nests and minefields that might follow. No need to go to New Mexico and declare “Ich bin ein Sunland Parker.”
The Corpus Christi Caller Times reports (archive link) that the move
makes good on Abbott’s promise during a trip to New York City late last month when he told a conservative audience that migrants were bypassing the miles of razor wire and fencing along the Texas side of the Rio Grande near El Paso by moving to the west.
Sunland Park, you may recall, was briefly famous a few years ago when the loony grifters who wanted to build a privately funded fraud wall put a section of barrier up in the desert without a permit, and with no connection to any other barriers. Genius.
Abbott’s office referred questions from the Caller Times to the Texas Military Department, which didn’t respond to the paper’s request for details on how many undocumented border crossers actually enter Texas after first crossing from Mexico into New Mexico.
It’s all part of Abbott’s ongoing campaign to stir up panic about asylum seekers by putting them in danger, and to try to make his very own laws on the border. But a serious moral and democratic principle is at stake: Maybe if Republicans get tired of Donald Trump and the current crop of lousy presidential candidates, maybe a new tough-on-immigration candidate could win the 2024 nomination. Or maybe he’s just an asshole that way.
And while the federal government is the only authority charged with enforcing immigration laws — a principle the Supreme Court upheld yet again just this year — Abbott wants to win votes and influence federal law by pursuing his very own anti-immigrant actions, like laying razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande and putting floating death buoys right in the middle of the river. He’s hoping to win court approval for a cockamamie constitutional “theory” that governors can use their states’ National Guard units to repel an “invasion” of undocumented migrants. No court has yet actually taken up the loony idea, but maybe provoking a fight with another state might do the job.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham hasn’t yet commented on the latest Abbott provocation, possibly because it’s fucking stupid.
[KFOX14/CBS4 / Corpus Christi Caller Times (archive link) / Image generated by DreamStudio AI, Abbott image based on a photo by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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