Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is sounding the alarm and is putting the U.S. Supreme Court on notice ahead of a big federal border security policy change.
Abbott, a Republican, warned that the end of the Trump-era pandemic-related rule called Title 42 means that thousands of illegal immigrants will be pouring into the country daily since there is no measure keeping them from trying to claim asylum.
“If the courts do not intervene and put a halt to the removal of Title 42, it’s gonna be total chaos,” Abbott warned.
“Whether it’s COVID or some other issue, when you have people coming across the globe without knowing – at all – what their health status is, that almost by definition, is a public health risk,” he said. “There’s every reason to keep that in place.”
WATCH:
EXCLUSIVE: With the expected end of Title 42 just days away, @MarthaRaddatz sits down with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on the southern border.
“If the courts do not intervene and put a halt to the removal of Title 42, it's gonna be total chaos," Abbott says. https://t.co/6hEynkzYMP pic.twitter.com/jpugtWlvBJ
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) December 18, 2022
The Daily Wire noted further:
Abbott called on President Joe Biden to enforce the existing laws. Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked the administration from ending Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, which sent some non-Mexican migrants to Mexico while awaiting immigration hearings rather than being detained or released in the U.S.
Texas is one of several Republican-led states currently trying to keep the Title 42 border policy in place. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal of the original court decision on Friday, but Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich confirmed to ABC that he intends to appeal that ruling to the Supreme Court in an effort to extend Title 42.
“If the President steps up and does his job, required by the Constitution and required by the federal courts, and enforces Remain in Mexico, that would have the same level of effectiveness as keeping Title 42 in place,” said Abbott.
In the meantime, “we have every level of government doing everything we can to prevent people from coming into the country illegally or repelling them or arresting them and putting them behind bars,” he said.
Meanwhile, the mayor of El Paso, Oscar Leeser, declared a state of emergency on Sunday following a massive influx of illegal aliens, saying he could no longer keep residents safe.
“I said from the beginning that I would call it when I felt that either our asylum seekers or community were not safe,” Leeser said, according to KFOX14.
“That’s not the way we want to treat people and by calling a state of an emergency it gives us the ability today to be able to do what we couldn’t do until we called it,” Leeser added.