During a roundtable discussion on the border crisis on Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a stern warning to any illegal immigrants considering entering the country through the Lone Star State.
The governor stated, “You’re picking the wrong state to get into if you’re traveling toward the United States of America and you’re thinking about crossing our border and you’re thinking about making your border crossing into the state of Texas. “We’re going to do everything we can to keep you out of our border, to keep you out of our country.”
Abbott Wants A Minimum Of 10-year Prison Term For illegal Immigrants
One of the things Abbott wants to implement is a 10-year minimum prison term for anyone caught in Texas smuggling illegal immigrants into the country.
The governor claimed that despite smugglers frequently being lured by social media postings to transport illegal immigrants to locations just hours from the border, he is not satisfied with the sanctions for them.
According to Abbott, Texas had the fewest border crossings three years prior as a result of former President Donald Trump’s efforts to limit catch-and-release fishing, enact Title 42, erect a border wall, and promote legal immigration rather than illegal entry.
Then, Abbott said, as soon as President Biden assumed office, all those policies were dropped, allowing immigrants to enter the country illegally without being held accountable.
The governor used data that began in 2020 and covered the second week of February. He said that 3,985 illegal immigrants were captured at the Texas border during the week of February 12th, 2020. According to Abbott, 13,672 illegal aliens were detained in the same week in 2021 and 21,560 in the same week in 2022.
The current president’s border policy led Texas to adopt its own measures to combat the number of illegal immigrants entering the country through the state, and Abbott did not hold back when criticizing it verbally.
He said that after the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) and Texas National Guard were sent to the border to combat illegal immigration, more than 25,000 of the most dangerous offenders were seized and over 330,000 “gotaways” were captured.
The governor hypothesized that thousands of illegal immigrants would have been harming the nation through crime or the distribution of drugs like fentanyl if the Texas DPS hadn’t been put in place.
The head of the Texas DPS, Steve McCraw, reported on Tuesday that his team had confiscated more than 19 tons of fentanyl and noted that the substance is not what it once was. He explained that the lethal substance is now produced in factories utilizing chemicals from China that make it possible to produce pure fentanyl and methamphetamine rather than in hotel rooms.
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