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There is a happening currently happening along the Texas/Mexico border which seems to be escalating in an interesting way.
The state of Texas has been taking measures to secure their border with Mexico. These measures include installing concertina wire (colloquially known as "razor wire") along the border.
A supreme court ruling said that US Border Patrol (the feds) are allowed to go into Texas against Texas's wishes and cut this wire. As /u/slowboy points out below, it is a bit more nuanced than that. There was an injunction preventing CBP from going to cut the wires, and the Supreme Court overruled it. Interesting culture war fodder: Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority on this.
Yesterday, Greg Abbot signaled that he did not have any intention of complying with this.
Today, President Biden said that Texas has until tomorrow (Friday) to let them in. (Sorry for the low quality link here. If somebody has a better one please share it).
This does seem to be escalating rapidly. I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down. If he doesn't, what does that mean? Texas National Guard vs the Federal Government sounds awfully close to...I hate saying this, but a civil war? That's not right though since I can't imagine them shooting at each other.
This is also confusing to me politically. The border situation is not a political win for Biden. Even among liberals the cracks are starting to show. Morning Joe (msnbc show) this morning was talking about how there is a border crisis and it's the republicans causing all this illegal immigration by not doing a "Comprehensive Immigration Policy". That's obviously absurd, but it does show that liberals are willing to agree that completely open borders are suboptimal.
Edit: Trump weighs in
This, to my stupid non-lawyer brain, seems way more like an "incitement to insurrection" than anything he said on January 6th. Interesting.
At some point federal agents could arrest state national guardsmen. If they're afraid of forceful resistance, just send the arrest warrants to the guardsmen's home addresses. They can be physically handcuffed after the "crisis" is over. I doubt many people are willing to risk their freedom to defend Abbot's showmanship.
Alternatively...Biden could enforce the border. I know it sounds crazy, but at this point its a political win for him to work with Abbot.
Yeah on an object level it's insane that Biden is fighting to remove barriers to illegal immigration.
I recently read a Todd Bensman post that dropped the last puzzle piece in place. The Biden administration's illegal immigration policy (or lack thereof) just spent November and December in the spotlight, with even traditionally sympathetic media outlets raising eyebrows at the magnitude of border crossings and highlighting uncomfortable results in opinion polls. A handful of diplomatic meetings between the US and Mexico took place in late December, and in the opening weeks of January the Mexican government suddenly found an urgent need to shut down La Bestia, a train route traveling from Guatemala to the US border (technically with a "layover" in a Mexico City freight yard), and the primary corridor of illegal immigration from Central America for the entire Biden administration. Migrants are now being bussed to Villahermosa with increasing frequency and urgency, hot on the heels of the US diplomatic visit. Longitudinal flights from Piedras Negras (across the border from Eagle Pass) restarted concurrent to the diplomatic meeting (PDF, see last two pages - by migrant advocacy group Witness to the Border, so it's only an estimate, but probably close to accurate, especially for obvious signals like restarting known longitudinal flights). The Matamoros/Brownsville migrant camps were bulldozed at the end of December. There's a lot more actions taken in the last few weeks, but the upshot is that border crossings are way down, shantytowns aren't on nightly TV any more, and record-setting border crossings are momentarily a thing of the past.
I saw threads for the last two weeks wondering about Abbott's possible motivations. I believe comments like this illustrate the reason. The Biden administration is taking measurable steps to halt the flow of illegal immigrants (up to you if it's a genuine change of heart or just cynical ratings management), and the results have been observable. By picking a fight with the federal government now, Abbott shifts the frame from "the Biden administration is making measurable progress reducing illegal immigration" to "the Biden administration is fighting to make illegal immigration easier," which at a soundbyte level is a win for Abbott. Any subsequent moves the Biden administration makes to reign him in just turn into more headlines for Abbott, adding up to a serious perception problem at election day against Donald "Build The Wall" Trump. Consequently, the Biden administration wants to avoid escalation, and now they have a ruling in-hand that undermines any object-level obstruction by Texas without actually compelling Texas to do anything different.
That's really interesting but considering the sheer number of crossings we saw in the first 3 years of Biden's administration and the way they very publicly undid as many of the previous administration's immigration restrictions as they could, I'm not sure it moves the needle much for me. It's simply too little too late for any under the table actions Biden takes to change my opinion of his record on immigration as a voter, if he wanted to go that direction, it should have been done earlier in his tenure. If he'd undone most of Trump's restrictions but actually kept immigration numbers similar, I would be much more inclined to vote for him.
I agree. I don't think many voters are impressed by some kind of self-congratulatory back-patting exercise for solving a problem the administration itself is responsible for exacerbating for the last three years. I mentioned this in a different comment, but for consistency I'll repeat it here: the more I think about it, the less I think the Biden administration wants a narrative about progress, and the more I think they just want the border and illegal immigration out of the news. They're in a bad position, largely of their own making, and now any attempt to bring the numbers down just comes off as cynical optics manipulation.
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As a voter, this seems to be an ongoing vibe from the Biden administration, and I'm not sure I like it. It feels like they're focus grouping every decision and trying to sweep tough-but-necessary decisions under the rug without actually having to make a stand on the issues. When it works, it feels pretty competent, but on several issues it's recently felt like very limp-wristed leadership when they try to claim "we're working on it" while they point generally to actions they've been intentionally hiding under the table.
Look at the shipping issues in Yemen: the administration gave out lots of "final warnings", and it seems that even when they finally decided to strike back -- after what, at least to me, comes off as an unreasonable number of shots fired at American ships to tolerate -- they did so weakly enough that they've had to repeat their attacks several times and still haven't resolved the conflict. I get that there's a suite of left-wing activists (many now protesting the administration's handling of the Gaza war) that were pushing for peace in the Houthi-Saudi war, frequently accusing the Saudi coalition of genocide, and that it broadly looks like the US is having to pick up that battle where they left off. There are people in their coalition in favor of unrestricted immigration, too. But their actions in both cases seem chosen first to limit outrage from the extreme corners of their voting bloc, and actual effectiveness is a much lower priority. If it was actually working, that'd be one thing, but I think the average concerned voter was looking for something more decisive (see Operation Praying Mantis), rather than a slowly-escalating quagmire. Similar to the Obama administration's "red lines" in Syria, it looks weak to me as an observer.
But on immigration specifically, the Biden administration came into office and specifically and publicly undid many of the policy decisions of its predecessor ("remain in Mexico", "build a wall"), claiming those were unnecessary and cruel. But here we are a few years later, and they've had to walk some of those back: they're building a wall and at least moving toward involving Mexico in the process. But they can't acknowledge that, maybe, their opponents might have been partly right on the issue (because, in a large part, of their coalition with "Orange Man Bad"). And while they claim to be working on solutions, I haven't seen anyone propose either reforming the asylum process in question. Could we surge resources to handle the backlog of cases and hear every case in, say, 24 hours? Could we increase the standards to promptly toss out a large fraction of the cases that will eventually be denied anyway? AFAIK the asylum system is entirely defined by Congress and Executive fiat and surely gives some legal leeway here. I honestly don't have any good suggestions for preventing physical crossings or handling deportations of the unwilling, but surely someone has some.
Sure.
First of all, you implement an immediate 40-year prison term that explicitly pierces the corporate veil for any hiring of illegal immigrants. E-verify? Mandatory. Second, you remove any and all sources of aid or welfare to illegal immigrants until they voluntarily sign up for deportation. Third, you go over to the NSA building and get them to run a search through their system for all the undocumented and illegal immigrants in their system. Every single one of them that is currently employed has a letter sent to their employer informing them that they're either going to fire their immigrant employee or go to prison for the rest of their life. The number of crossings will go dramatically down when there's no way to profit or sustain an existence in the US as an illegal immigrant, so you'd be able to save on the border defence as well.
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But then why was Biden even fighting in the first place? Don’t litigate currently. If Abbot was just trying to set up what you believe is a political stunt to make it clear Biden is pro illegal immigration, then didn’t Biden fall right into it?
Earlier I implied that the administration wants to create a narrative about progress, but the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that they just want the numbers to go down and have everyone forget about the border and illegal immigration for a while. They don't get credit from the left or the right for reducing illegal immigration numbers: the left complains about denying the poor, impoverished families of their American Dream; the right assumes any attempt by the Biden administration to reign in illegal immigration is bad faith optics manipulation. I think at this point they're trying to stop the bleeding. I wouldn't say Biden "fell into" some political trap, so much as the administration got spooked into action by numbers and headlines they couldn't ignore, and Republicans see that kind of panic as a glowing red weak point.
Now the administration is under attack from a bad angle, and they have to respond or risk losing control of the narrative. If they had no response, this comes off as a tacit admission that the administration's border security policy has failed. As previously mentioned, over-reacting is also dangerous, since it hands the enemy obvious ammunition: "Why is Biden fighting so hard to let illegal immigrants in?" Getting a judicial ruling that explicitly negates Abbott's directives casts Abbott as a lawbreaker, and emphasizing medical emergencies portrays him as cruel, all without compelling Abbott to do anything. It plays well with the base, if conversations with friends are any indicator... prevailing left-wing opinion of Abbott can be roughly summarized as "crooked, deranged lawfare man," and pulling out "the judge said you're obviously wrong and bad" fuels plenty of sneering. Out of a handful of bad options, I think this is probably the best one.
There's also the optics of corpses piling up on the shores of a headline-news border crossing to consider. I'm sure the rank and file have enough genuine empathy in them to be alarmed and upset when Texas declares they have no obligation to rescue the injured or the dying, but this is still a pretty abstract concept - it's easy to say "people will die" without fully internalizing it. Compare with news crews finding piles of bodies and asking why Joe Biden lets Texas get away with it. That's the start of an uncomfortable conversation, and it keeps the border in the news. Now CBP has cover to keep cutting through Texas obstructions and keep the body count low.
Of course they can. Slow and steady wins the race. The pace has been too rapid last couple years, cities can't cope with it, you've had schools closed to assimilate new blacks and browns.
Electing a new people can't be a too hasty affair. One needs to be patient so there's less possibility of a back clash. You need to pass hate speech laws criminalising opposition to it. Just opening the border and letting in tens of millions like in the infamous book, nah. Cinematic, but really, it's more of a decades long project.
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I think Abbott has reasonable grounds to be suspicious; is this new Democrat crackdown a genuine change of heart, or will it last only until the election is over and then things to back to 'normal'? I'm not saying how he's dealing with it is the optimum way, but I certainly wouldn't accept the bona fides of any such "we are absolutely going to stop all this" campaigns by the Democrat administration, given the way "they're locking kids in cages!" and AOC flying down to cry in front of photographers happened.
Ofc it's fake.
You have democrats- some black congresswoman on video saying this migration is good for redistricting purposes and that ofc they're going to later vote for them.
And honestly it doesn’t matter — the imported voter base already happened.
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CNN had some ownership/leadership changes in 2022 which included an explicitly stated goal of being more neutral. Whether they're a right-wing media outlet now depends on who you ask, but they're actively trying to shed their image as a pro-Democratic-Party one.
Hope and gullibility spring eternal.
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So, that went well. Whether Zaslaw is still pushing for neutrality or not is unclear to me, but I'll grant that there's grounds to believe CNN is no longer a sympathetic media outlet.
In any case, here's the New York Times and the Washington Post. A brief Google search turned up similar anxiety across NPR, NBC, CBS, the AP, ABC, Fox (of course)... Even MSNBC started running interference in early January, and much like one can infer the rough outline of an object from the shadow it casts, here too we can infer the immigration-shaped issue from the article's calculated absence of context. Setting aside sympathies, record-breaking illegal immigration figures were inarguably headline news in December, and that's not a good look for Biden.
My cynical take on that is, did the NYT get concerned about the issue after the migrants started turning up in New York and having to be sheltered in tent cities there? It's easy to finger-wag at the terrible Texans when your city is not the one dealing with 5,000 a day coming in, but when they start doing that to the City Of Immigrants, oh my now what is the President doing about this?
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