Does Texas Have the Authority to Protect Its Borders?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns sovereignty of states and nations. Every single state of the fifty states in the United States of America are supposed to be sovereign with the power and authority to protect their residents. In addition, the United States is a sovereign nation with the responsibility to secure its borders and to protect its citizens from invasion by foreigners.

Article IV Section 4 states: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” (Emphasis added.” 

Yet, the federal government refuses to close the borders and protect against invasion. Estimates are that seven million illegal immigrants have crossed our borders since Joe Biden became President of the United States.

The Republican Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has tried several ways to secure the Texas border with Mexico and spent several million (billion?) dollars doing so. Abbott’s latest attempt to secure the border was to use floating barriers in the Rio Grande River. Abbott is doing the job that Biden should be doing. However, the Department of Justice recently announced that it is suing Abbott for using the floating barriers. Abbott response to the lawsuit was, “I’ll see you in court, Mr. President.” Cal Thomas wrote of the irony of the lawsuit. 

There are 29 established ports of entry along the Texas border. Any migrant with a credible asylum claim can be legally processed at any one of them. In total, there are 110 Border Patrol checkpoints along the border, a border which the United Nations declared last year is the “deadliest land crossing in the world.”

Laughably, the Department of Justice claims in its lawsuit filing that Abbott had ordered the “unlawful construction of a floating barrier in the Rio Grande River” and says the barrier might impede the federal government’s “official duties.”

One might reasonably believe that the most important of the government’s “official duties” would be to enforce the law, if only to deter the importation of the deadly drug fentanyl. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, there were “106,699 drug-involved overdose deaths reported in the U.S. in 2021…. Synthetic opioids other than methadone (primarily fentanyl) were the main driver of drug overdose deaths with a nearly 7.5-fold increase from 2015 to 2021.”

The first obligation of any president is to protect the lives of American citizens, whether from threats by a foreign power, or threats from the power that comes from people and drugs pouring across the border. In refusing to do this, the president has violated his oath of office in which he solemnly swore to “faithfully execute” his duties.

I agree with Thomas that “faithfully execute” his duties means that a President should uphold the laws of the land. Biden and his administration are breaking the laws rather than upholding them. Every President takes the following oath of office: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” 

Biden is obviously not keeping this oath because he is not protecting Americans from the invasion of illegal immigrants who are cross our border.