Texas Really Really Really Wants Civil War, Pleaaaaase
No, really, Texas. You aren't a country. You don't get to do your own border laws.
The state of Texas pushed its ongoing fight with the US government over immigration a little farther yesterday, refusing to give up control of a city park next to the Rio Grande that it seized last week and daring the Justice Department to come and take the park back if it thinks America is the boss of Texas.
Just for the record, according to the Constitution, the USA is in fact the boss of Texas, at least when it comes to matters of immigration and immigration enforcement. But Gov. Greg Abbott has a harebrained idea that the Constitution secretly gives him the power to use Texas cops and the National Guard to repel an “invasion,” so the state keeps looking for chances to get his pet rightwing theory into federal courts, and ultimately before the Supreme Court. In Abbott’s dreams, the Supremes will declare that the federal government is no longer in charge of immigration law, and then Abbott will be King Shit of Fuck Mexico Mountain. With troops and maybe artillery.
In the latest gambit, Texas National Guard troops took over Shelby park in Eagle Pass, Texas, blocking US Border Patrol agents from an area the feds have been using to hold and screen migrants who cross the river and turn themselves in to request asylum, which is still legal in the USA. The Border Patrol didn’t care for Texas’s attempt to block it from doing its job, so Homeland Security’s top lawyer, Jonathan Meyer,
warned Texas Attorney General Paxton over the weekend that the department would refer the matter to the Justice Department for potential legal action if the state did not relent.
In a scathing response to Meyer on Wednesday, Paxton indicated that Texas would not back down, rejecting the Biden administration's accusation that state's actions were "clearly unconstitutional."
Paxton’s nastygram claimed that Texas has “the facts and the law” on its side, and obliquely referred to Abbott’s pretend theory that the governor is an actual military commander exercising Texas’s “constitutional authority to defend her territory,” so Paxton would see DHS in court.
As we like to remind you, that claim of “constitutional authority” depends on a bizarre misreading of the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 10, which clearly refers to military threats, not to a metaphorical “invasion” of undocumented migrants:
No State shall, without the consent of Congress, … engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.
So far, no court has actually agreed with Texas, or even taken up Abbott’s weird theory, because there’s no need to: The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the federal government is in charge of immigration policy, even if governors want to make up their own. Yes, even the bad new Supreme Court. Even that one!
So now it’s the Battle of Shelby Park, and Texas troopers on Wednesday began arresting migrants there, even if that’s the Border Patrol’s job. This is just the latest escalation after Texas troopers prevented Border Patrol officers from assisting in the emergency response when a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande over the weekend. In a filing with the Supreme Court as part of the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Abbott’s buoys and barbed wire at the border, the DOJ clarified that the three had already died by the time the Border Patrol was blocked from helping other migrants in distress, as CBS News reports.
Still, the Justice Department suggested the situation could have played out differently if Texas had not sealed off Shelby Park.
"It is impossible to say what might have happened if Border Patrol had had its former access to the area — including through its surveillance trucks that assisted in monitoring the area," the Justice Department said Monday. "At the very least, however, Border Patrol would have had the opportunity to take any available steps to fulfill its responsibilities and assist its counterparts in the Mexican government with undertaking the rescue mission. Texas made that impossible."
So far, the fight over the park has been limited to an exchange of legal filings and letters, but we won’t be the least bit surprise if it escalates, because after all Texas has an important crackpot legal theory it needs to get before the federal courts, and with a cause as righteous as that, who cares if some migrants drown?
Over the weekend, the White House denounced Texas's move in Eagle Pass as "inhumane" and "dangerous," saying Border Patrol "must have access to the border to enforce our laws."
Paxton rebuffed that criticism on Wednesday, telling DHS it was not fully enforcing U.S. immigration law.
"There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens," he said.
If Joe Biden would simply do his job and shut down the border completely, build WALL, abolish asylum, and start strafing migrants in the river from helicopter gunships, none of this would be necessary.
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Just a reminder to you filthy fuckaducks that the goddamned commenting rules have not been suspended, so could you please try to stop fantasizing about neat tortures you'd like to inflict on Greg Abbott or Ken Paxton, or about what we really need is to have the regular Army shoot Texas National Guard members for being in rebellion, or whatever other fucking cruelties you wish to inflict in revenge for Abbott's cruelties.
Wonkette doesn't allow that and you should know better. You do not have to say nice things. But damned if I will let this comment section become a forum for murder fantasies.
Edit: We do not allow ableist shit like calling Abbott "hot wheels" either. His disability has fuck-all to do with his evil politics.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/rules-for-commenting-radicals
Abbot obviously doesn't want to win this case, since ceding immigration policy back to the states would mean that New Mexico, which is right next to Texas and a blue state, could simply liberalize the shit out of its immigration policies and we'd be right back where we started. Hell, he'd be worse off than where he started, because now he has to police the Mexico *and* the New Mexico border.
This is performative horseshit meant to appeal to the worst people in the world.