When President Joe Biden paid a visit to El Paso, Texas, on Sunday, Gov. Greg Abbott greeted him at the airport. The two men shook hands. Then Abbott handed the president a letter. Here’s what was in the letter.
‘Too little ... too late’
Abbott, a Republican, told Biden his visit “is $20 billion too little and two years too late. Moreover, your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies. … This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted.”
‘Emboldened the cartels’
“Your open-border policies have emboldened the cartels, who grow wealthy by trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings,” Abbott wrote. “Texans are paying an especially high price for your failure, sometimes with their very lives, as local leaders from your own party will tell you if given the chance.”
‘You have a job to do’
“Halfway through your presidency, though, I can finally welcome you to the border,” Abbott wrote. “When you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do.”
And a few other things …
Abbott called on Biden to do a few other things: End the practice of parole for immigrants en masse. Fully enforce Title 42, the pandemic-era public health rule allowing border agents to expel migrants quickly, and the “Remain in Mexico” policy, requiring migrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico until their U.S. immigration court date. Resume construction of the border wall along the Texas-Mexico border. And designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
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