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. 

Is America Being Invaded?

            Is it appropriate to use the word invasion to describe the flood of undocumented immigrants across our southern border? Leaders from several Texas counties in southern Texas have declared that they are under invasion. Virginia Allen defined the problem as follows. 

The number of migrants that the Border Patrol has encountered this year has been growing steadily. In January, there were more than 154,000 migrant encounters, according to Customs and Border Protection. That number jumped to more than 239,000 in May. And those numbers don’t include so-called got-aways, who eluded detection or capture.

In the current fiscal year (which began on Oct. 1) alone, there have already been 1.5 million apprehensions at the border, said Mark Morgan, former acting commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection and a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation, at the press conference….

“Think about the number of young women and children now that have been sexually assaulted because of the open-border policies,” Morgan said. “Think about the absolute expansion of human trafficking, the atrocities, because of this administration’s open-border policies.”

            The Texas leaders have a reason for using the word invasion: the language in Articles I and IV of the United States Constitution. “Article I grants the states the power, if the federal government doesn’t act, to take matters into their own hands to protect their citizens,” said Brent Smith, Kinney County attorney. In a press conference, the leaders detailed how the vast numbers of illegal immigrants are affecting their communities.

            Thaddeus Cleveland is currently sheriff of Terrell County, but he served as a Border Patrol agent for 26 years before retiring last April. Even though his county does not border Mexico, the many illegal immigrants coming to his county take resources away from legal residents. Without blaming the Border Patrol, he stated, “We lose the ability to respond to our citizens because we’re having to respond to Border Patrol agent calls. We’re just under resourced.” Cleveland claimed that the border crisis is a “fixable problem.”

            Sheriff Brad Coe of Kinney County caught 1,121 illegal immigrants in his county in 2021. The number went up to 1,600 in 2022. Mayor Don McLaughlin of Uvalde, Texas, described the situation in his county a “nightmare” even though his town is located 65 miles from the Mexico border. Sheriff Roy Boyd of Goliad County, located 100 miles south of San Antonio, gave the following description of the “nightmare” in his community caused by swarms of illegal immigrants.

You hear the term “invasion,” and that’s exactly what this is. But you hear the term “immigration,” and I’ll tell you: This is not immigration. This is a slave trade.

We deal with this every day in our counties. These individuals that are being brought to us, coming to our county, we’re intercepting. They are not free to go.

They’re the property of the cartels who get them to Houston and then move them around the country, where they have to work off their indebtedness to the cartel one way or another, whether that be unloading drugs, selling drugs, working in restaurants, working in hotels, or whether it be forced prostitution all across the United States of America.

These individuals are not free. We’re importing a peon class, and we are allowing the cartels to do it. It is an invasion that is being pushed by the cartels into our country, and it must come to a stop.

            Local leaders were not the only people at the press conference. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) called on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to declare the state of Texas under invasion.

Would you recognize an invasion? …. An invasion of the state of Texas that is undermining our security, risking the health and well-being of Texans, allowing fentanyl to pour into our schools and communities, for Texans to die, allowing our ranches to get run over, empowering cartels who are well-armed along the border with their tentacles reaching into Texas.

You’re damn right that’s an invasion.

            Ken Cuccinelli is the former attorney general of Virginia, and he told reporters that the Kinney County decision “to declare that it is under invasion is a historic one.” Tuesday was the first day in American history that a “legal authority … found as a matter of law that the United States is being invaded.”

What I’ve heard here consistently, whether it’s the sheriffs, the judges, the mayors, county attorneys, is the desperation, the desperation of communities on the front line of establishing and maintaining America’s sovereignty because the federal government isn’t doing it.

            The county leaders lobbed the ball to Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Will the governor declare that the state of Texas is under invasion? If and when he does, the state could then block the people coming cross the border illegally.