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Continuing his focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday ordered Texas National Guard members to assist the Department of Public Safety with arresting individuals on state charges related to illegal immigration.
Abbott’s order in a letter to Major General Tracy R. Norris, Adjutant General of the Texas National Guard, comes after the governor’s original May 31 disaster declaration, which directed DPS to enforce all federal and state criminal laws relating to border crossing, including for criminal trespassing, smuggling and human trafficking.
“To respond to this disaster and secure the rule of law at our Southern border, more manpower is needed,” Abbott said in the letter. “DPS needs help in arresting those who are violating state law … I hereby order that the Texas National Guard assist DPS in enforcing Texas law by arresting lawbreakers at the border.”
Earlier this month, The Texas Tribune reported that a prison in Dilley, Texas, had officially started detaining the immigrants accused of state crimes.
Allowing state and local law enforcement officers to arrest immigrants for state crimes is a new tactic by the governor to assert more control over national immigration policy. By allowing those law enforcement agencies to arrest migrants on state charges, Abbott is circumventing their lack of jurisdictional power to arrest someone accused of the federal crime of crossing the border illegally.
The maneuver to add additional law enforcement power behind the effort to detain more migrants at the border comes amid politically charged criticism of President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration. Many believe that when Biden took office in January, it directly led to a surge in migration because of the expectation that his immigration policies would be more friendly to migrants than those of his predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
In May, law enforcement encounters with migrants at the southern border hit 180,000, the highest number in 20 years, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
At a visit to the Texas border in June, Donald Trump pointed a finger to Biden’s policies as the cause of the surge, which he described as a serious threat to public safety.
He described the migrants as “murderers, human traffickers, all of these people, drug dealers — are coming back into our country,” he said during a joint speech with Abbott, who echoed the same points.
In his call for the special session that began on July 8, Abbott included to the agenda legislation that would provide “funding to support law-enforcement agencies, counties, and other strategies as part of Texas’ comprehensive border security plan.”
That effort is stalled as Democrats remain in Washington, D.C. to break quorum, but the call for more manpower to detain more migrants shows the governor plans to continue with this effort.