Gov. Greg Abbott
By BETHANY BLANKLEY
THE CENTER SQUARE CONTRIBUTOR
(The Center Square) — Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent two buses of foreign nationals from the southern border to Vice President Kamala Harris’ Washington, D.C., residence after she twice claimed on Sunday that the southern border is secure.
Two buses arrived at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., Thursday carrying 100 people who illegally entered the U.S. and were released into Texas instead of being detained or deported by Customs and Border Protection in accordance with federal immigration law, the governor’s office said.
They are citizens of Colombia, Cuba, Guyana, Nicaragua, Panama and Venezuela, the governor’s office said. They illegally entered the U.S. through Eagle Pass, Texas, after crossing the Rio Grande River from Mexico.
“The Biden-Harris administration continues ignoring and denying the historic crisis at our southern border, which has endangered and overwhelmed Texas communities for almost two years,” Gov. Abbott said. “Our supposed Border Czar, Vice President Kamala Harris, has yet to even visit the border to see firsthand the impact of the open border policies she has helped implement, even going so far as to claim the border is ‘secure.’ Texas will continue sending migrants to sanctuary cities like Washington, D.C. until President Biden and Border Czar Harris step up and do their jobs to secure the border.”
Vice President Harris was tasked by the president last year to manage the border crisis. She has yet to visit the busiest points of entry along the Texas-Mexico border in the Del Rio and Rio Grande Valley Border Patrol Sectors. Texas has five sectors, the most of any state in the U.S., and shares the majority of the U.S.-Mexico’s 1,254 mile-border.
Vice President Harris twice claimed on Sunday in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the border is secure while she was visiting Houston, the largest city closest to the southern border and major U.S. human trafficking hub.
“I think that there is no question that we have to do what the president and I asked Congress to do, the first request we made: Pass a bill to create a pathway to citizenship,” Ms. Harris said. “The border is secure, but we also have a broken immigration system, in particular, over the last four years before we came in, and it needs to be fixed.”
NBC News anchor Chuck Todd replied, “We’re going to have 2 million people cross the border for the first time ever. You’re confident this border’s secure?”
She again said, “We have a secure border,” adding it’s “a priority for any nation, including ours and our administration. But there are still a lot of problems that we are trying to fix given the deterioration that happened over the last four years. We also have to put into place a law and a plan for a pathway for citizenship for the millions of people who are here and are prepared to do what is legally required to gain citizenship.
“We don’t have that in place because people are playing politics in a state like this and in Congress,” she added, referring to Texas.
Outside of her residence, a Venezuelan man told Fox News, “Everybody believes that the border is open … We see it on the news that everybody comes in illegally, so we do the same.”
At a United We Stand Summit hosted in the White House on Thursday, a White House pool reporter asked Vice President Harris to comment on the buses arriving at her residence, and she walked away.
In April, Gov. Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to charter buses to transport foreign nationals illegally entering the U.S. and being released into Texas by the Biden administration to send them to Washington, D.C. In August, he began sending them to New York City and Chicago. More than 10,000 people have been sent north to the three so-called sanctuary cities at the expense of Texas taxpayers so far.
The buses arrived at Vice President Harris’ residence after 29 Texas counties declared an invasion at the Texas-Mexico border.
