A toddler, passed out from heat exhaustion and caught on a coil of barbed wire, pushed back without assistance by armed men. Desperate people denied water on orders from above, and left to die as a deterrent to others. These aren’t scenes from some UN observer report on a warzone, but details from a Texas state trooper’s email to a supervisor, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, calling the force’s border deployment “inhumane.”
As always, Gov. Greg Abbott is couching his efforts in the language of anti-smuggling (despite the fact that the vast majority of smuggling takes place at official ports of entry) and insisting that he’s being forced to take on a role that the federal government is neglecting. In reality he’s trying to violently wrest away control over a key federal function, with little resistance.
Abbott is right that President Joe Biden and the feds are abdicating a crucial role, just not in the way that he means. How can Biden allow a governor to appoint himself a border enforcer and use state tools to preempt the federal role of immigration regulation in a way that has long passed the point of being merely performative or annoying but has become an active violation of human rights?
