by Eric Lendrum
On Thursday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R-Texas) claimed that the state of Texas is on track to build more wall along the southern border than was constructed during President Donald Trump’s first term.
As the New York Post reports, Abbott made his remarks during a press conference in Shelby Park, the territory that Texas state authorities seized from the Border Patrol and other federal agencies following Abbott’s declaration of an invasion.
“Texas is the first and only state in the history of the United States of America to build our own border wall,” said Abbott. “If you look at the amount of wall already constructed and the amount of wall that is going to be under construction, Texas will have built more of the Trump border wall than even Trump built in the state of Texas.”
In addition to the actual wall being built, Texas has currently set up about 160 miles of other types of physical barriers along the border, ranging from barbed wire fencing and metal cargo containers to buoys in the Rio Grande River. Abbott and state authorities have been cracking down on illegal immigration after the state legislature passed a bill making it a state crime to enter Texas illegally from a foreign country.
Abbott said that in the last period of about a year and a half, the number of illegal border crossings in Texas has dropped to less than one-third of total crossings in the United States, despite Texas covering two-thirds of the physical border with Mexico. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has arrested over 39,000 criminal illegal aliens, stopped 95,000 attempted illegal entries, and apprehended over 480,000 illegals.
“The results are amazing,” Abbott continued. “Now, unlike before, migrants are choosing to go to states other than Texas and that’s because Texas has put up the resistance that it has. Early on in the Biden administration, most of the migrants were coming through Texas. That’s [no longer] true.”
Most recently, the Biden Administration sued the state of Texas over its decision to build its own physical barriers, demanding that the courts rule in favor of the federal government and thus allow the Border Patrol and other federal agencies to dismantle any makeshift barriers. Although the Supreme Court narrowly ruled in favor of the federal government, Abbott openly defied the Court’s ruling and continued building barriers and enforcing state law anyway, in a historic move by a state governor.
President Trump’s signature campaign promise in 2016 was to “build the wall” and secure the southern border. However, numerous obstruction efforts within Congress, from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, repeatedly denied him the funding he requested to build the wall. In the final year of his first term, President Trump announced that he would reallocate funds from the Department of Defense to go towards building the wall. Just as progress began taking off, Joe Biden came to power following the results of the controversial and suspicious 2020 election, and any further construction on the wall was halted on Biden’s orders.
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Eric Lendrum reports for American Greatness.
Photo “Greg Abbott” by Office of the Governor Greg Abbott.
