Texas Border Fight Raises Important Questions
Where does the power the enforce border law actually lie?
Perhaps the most contentious issue in America right now is the ongoing crisis at the southern border. As I love to document, even people in big blue sanctuary cities are sounding the alarm about the costs of illegal immigration — like these parents in New York protesting illegals being housed at their children’s schools:
Though they like to complain about staggering monetary costs, often politicians try to tap dance around what those costs actually mean, as seen here when CBS reporter Sabrina Franza asked Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson if he would raise taxes in the city to pay for ‘migrant’ services:
Mayor Johnson is clear (in an extremely opaque way): He expects the federal government to bail out Chicago. (I’m sure Mayor Adams of New York expects the same thing.) Mayor Johnson won’t raise taxes on the citizens of Chicago, he’s raising taxes on the citizens of America! Chicago is a sanctuary, Chicago is in America, ergo America is a sanctuary, too!
The crisis escalated another notch recently as Texas began refusing Border Patrol access to crossing hotspot Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, contending the federal government was refusing to enforce existing immigration law in the area. Texas National Guard troops installed razor wire at numerous points along the border and began arresting people who attempted to cross, frustrating would-be illegals:
The Biden administration then went to court to allow Border Patrol agents to cut or otherwise remove the razor wire — because of course they did. Yesterday, in a 5-4 split decision, the Supreme Court ruled the removal of razor wire was legal:
But with so many people in America in opposition to our defacto-open borders policy, Joe Biden was forced to go on the campaign trail to explain why allowing unlimited, unvetted illegal immigration is a good thing:
Oops, I must have the wrong video here……while I find the correct footage, here’s Democratic hero Bernie Sanders explaining how diversity is our strength and each person who crosses the border is an economic benefit to the entire country:
OK that’s really embarrassing — but to be fair, it’s sort of difficult to know which video to post when everything is labeled ‘meow.mp4’. But here’s President Obama explaining why we should keep the border open:
All jokes aside, it seems like nobody ACTUALLY supports the policies that we currently have in place — yet they continue. And now that reality is crashing its way into blue cities, Biden claims the border has been a mess for 10 years — here conveniently paired with a montage of Biden administration officials denying that’s the case.
It’s almost like these people made an entire career off of saying the border wall was racist and Donald Trump was racist and anybody who likes the border wall OR Donald Trump is racist — so they can’t just admit that he was right about the entire issue. CERTAINLY not when he’s the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024.
So the people who have been relentlessly pushing for open borders for the last three years need to find a scapegoat now that they’re paying a political price instead of preening and pandering.
Showcasing her second-greatest talent of completely contradicting what she’s previously said, here Kamala Harris explains that this system the Biden administration has enabled for the last three years is terrible, but ALSO knows who the real culprits are: REPUBLICANS!
But if you watch the video again, you’ll notice that she never actually mentions SECURITY at the border, just a way to process the people coming in AND GIVE THEM A PATH TO CITIZENSHIP.
Do you think this would increase or decrease illegal immigration?
And when Harris talks about getting a deal done, she means something like this:
That “border deal” looks like surrender! It looks like the cartels are running our immigration policy! (At least that would make some sort of sense.)
So while the “leaders” in DC quibble about how many people should be allowed to break the law per day and how we then integrate them into society, Texas said “ENOUGH.” And though Biden ultimately got his way at the Supreme Court, so far, Texas has held its ground and refused to allow Border Patrol agents to pass.
This raises some very interesting (and very old) questions about the states and where they stand in relation to the federal government. Ultimately we have to ask: Does Texas control its border, or does Washington DC control it? Immigration standards are clearly one of the few things expressly the responsibility of the federal government — but what if that federal government refuses to do its job?
It’s one thing to have a court order saying you can cut razor wire, but how far are you willing to go to make that happen? Tell National Guard troops to ignore direct orders? Arrest them if they refuse? Fire on them? What happens next could redefine the relationship between state and federal government.
When we think of the Civil War, we tend to think of the battles and the shooting and the violence — but there were also very important questions about the consent of the governed. We tend to think consent is a pretty big deal around here, and the very basis of consent is the ability to leave the relationship at any point. If you literally can’t leave me, the fact that you stay is completely meaningless. If the federal government continues to enforce policies the people of Texas don’t want, at what point does the state attempt to simply bow out of the union — and what happens then?
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I can only imagine the cognitive dissonance this causes the TDS-afflicted. If you build an identity around hating Trump, how do you say you were wrong and he was right?
Well Texas could always ignore the SC ruling, using Biden’s student-loan example.