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Tags: greg abbott | biden | border | texas | immigration

Texas Gov. Abbott: Biden's Border Visit Two Years, $20B Too Late

By    |   Sunday, 08 January 2023 12:47 PM EST

President Joe Biden's visit to El Paso Sunday is coming "two years too late and about $20 billion short of what needs to be done," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday. 

"All he's going to do down there is rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic," the Texas Republican told Fox News's "Sunday Morning Futures" host Maria Bartiromo. "He's not going to achieve any solutions that will make the border safer, more secure, and stop illegal immigration."

Biden's trip to the U.S.-Mexico border is his first there since he became president. He is expected to discuss migration and the increased trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids and it is a stop on the way to Mexico City for a North American leaders' summit meeting with the presidents of Mexico and Canada.

Abbott said Biden and his staff did not call his office to let them know about the visit, or invite him to meet in El Paso, until Saturday night, "so they have failed to communicate." 

The visit comes after the administration announced new border enforcement actions last week, including new rules for immigrants coming from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaraguan, and Venezuela, but Abbott called that plan "enticement" rather than enforcement. 

"There are things under current law that Biden can and must do," said Abbott. "One is he shall detain and stop the release of people crossing the border illegally. Second, he should be prosecuting those who cross the border illegally, which he is currently authorized to do. Third, he needs to aggressively reinforce the remain in Mexico as well as Title 42 policies that federal counts have required him to do."

The fourth thing, the governor said is that Biden must build a border wall. "Those are things he could do if his goal was to stop illegal immigration, but that's not his goal."

Abbott has been taking several steps to stop illegal border crossings, including ordering the National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety to put a stop to illegal crossings where they can. 

He added that during the recent increase of immigrants at El Paso, he ordered the National Guard to build razor wire and other barriers, as well as container boxes, like the ones the administration has been fighting in Arizona. 

But Texas hasn't heard anything from the administration on the barriers, and Abbott said he doesn't find that unusual. 

"It's like Texas, the leadership does not exist in the Biden administration, which is one of the problems," said Abbott. "We have very simple solutions the Biden administration could apply to do something about this if they wanted to, but they don't care about stopping illegal immigration."

Further, Abbott said El Paso is being "sanitized" before Biden's arrival, as the administration doesn't want Americans to see the chaos the White House has imposed. 

"He needs to talk to the thousands of Texans who live on the border whose lives have been destroyed by his policies, but he's not going to talk to anybody like that," said Abbott. "He's going to get a candy-coated version of what's going on and not know the information that he needs to understand so that he can fix this."

Meanwhile, Texas is expanding its efforts, including with the seizure of fentanyl, said Abbott. 

"We've seized enough fentanyl that would be enough to kill every American in the United States," he said, adding that Texas is on its way to building, by the end of this year, more wall than former President Donald Trump was able to build while in office. 

Abbott on Sunday also spoke out about the news that a document dump of files from the Jan. 6 committee contained a spreadsheet including the Social Security numbers of several Trump allies and Republicans, including his own. 

"This is a committee of the United States Congress," Abbott said. "We're looking into holding anybody accountable who was responsible for the release of this information…it may be the information of not only myself, but also my wife, so our information is exposed for criminals to use, for us to be exploited, for us to sustain, you know, extraordinary damages."

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Sandy Fitzgerald

Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics. 

© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.


Politics
President Joe Biden's visit to El Paso Sunday is coming "two years too late and about $20 billion short of what needs to be done," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday. "All he's going to do down there is rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic," the Texas Republican...
greg abbott, biden, border, texas, immigration
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2023-47-08
Sunday, 08 January 2023 12:47 PM
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