Flyers reportedly posted around a Resource Center Matamoros facility in Mexico encouraged illegal immigrants — who are not eligible to vote in the United States — to vote for President Joe Biden in November, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. One of the organizations operating out of the Resource Center Matamoros (RCM) has ties to Biden’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose articles of impeachment the U.S. House of Representatives delivered to the Senate Tuesday afternoon.
The flyers, which the Oversight Project posted photos of on X, read “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The Heritage Foundation said the flyers were first discovered by Muckraker but also confirmed to The Federalist that their own team had obtained a copy of one of the flyers “inside the RCM office.”
“The flyer in the X thread is a direct scan of the one our folks obtained on-site inside the RCM office,” a Heritage Foundation representative said. “The flyers were also posted all over the camp in the port-a-potties.”
Nevertheless, others have raised questions about the flyer, including Fox News’ Bill Melugin.
“I am extremely skeptical of this. The flier appears to be a word for word Google Translate copy & paste of a portion of the NGO’s English website, with ‘vote for Biden’ randomly added in at the end, when it does not appear on the site,” Melugin posted on X. “The translation is bad, then you have ‘bienvenidos’ spelled wrong and ‘todos con Biden’ added onto the flier with a Biden logo.”
Another social media user associated with a left-wing immigration group claimed to have spoken with the executive director of RCM and said the posters were “Totally fake” and “Made up by two posers.”
It is unclear whether RCM authorized the posting of the flyers, but the Heritage Foundation told The Federalist that because they found flyers in the RCM office, they have “every reason to believe” the flyer is from the organization. The Federalist reached out to RCM for more information but did not receive a response.
The flyers “appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” according to the Oversight Project.
These flyers were discovered by @realmuckraker throughout the Resource Center Matamoras (RCM) location including on the walls of port-a-potties
They also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA pic.twitter.com/hvlkwOI5Xs
RCM says it is “a humanitarian organization that provides a safe space where refugees at the southern Texas-Mexico border can access legal and social support services.” Its “6-unit office complex” hosts the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which provides “legal assistance and assistance with obtaining formal documents for job search and integration into the city of Matamoros as [migrants] wait to access the asylum process in the US.”
RCM founder and executive director Gaby Zavala previously worked with La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE)– a left-wing organization that is partnered with the Open Society Institute, as pointed out by the Oversight Project. The Open Society Institute is funded by left-wing billionaire and mega-donor George Soros.
RCM also worked alongside Team Brownsville, a left-wing organization, and Angry Tias and Abeulas, which aims to help illegal immigrants cross the border, according to the Oversight Project.
RCM has significant ties to Soros-funded non-profits operating in the United States, including Save the Children, Team Brownsville Texas, and Angry Tias and Abuelas pic.twitter.com/cydCAM4PdE
Mayorkas — whose disastrous handling of the invasion at the southern border earned him impeachment by the House — was formerly on the board of HIAS and in his current role with the Biden administration has met with members of both Angry Tias and Abuelas as well as LUPE, according to Judicial Watch.
While illegal immigrants and other noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections, federal voter registration forms simply require each individual to check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. The lack of any requirement that new voters show documentary proof of citizenship prompted former President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday to announce Republican legislation that would demand such documentation from new registrants.
The federal government currently prohibits states from requiring potential voters to provide such proof to register to vote in federal elections. States may require proof of citizenship to register for statewide elections, as Arizona does. But even in Arizona, a voter who attempts to register to vote with the state form but fails to provide proof of citizenship must then be registered to vote on a federal-only form.
During the 2020 presidential election, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, AZ Free News reported. President Joe Biden won the state by 10,457 votes.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has blocked border enforcement by the state under Texas’s SB 4. Many of us had predicted this result given the prior precedent of the Supreme Court on the federal preemption of state immigration laws. However, the opinion also rejected the invasion theory made by states under Article 1, Section 10 and the “State War Clause.” I also previously discussed how this interpretation would fail due to the text, intent, and history of the underlying constitutional provision.
The lawsuit had a good-faith basis in challenging the scope of federal preemption and seeking to regain some room for state officials to protect their border. Texas and other states have been reduced to passive observers as the Biden Administration maintains an effective open border. The state is then expected to deal with the massive burden of the influx. While I agree with the Fifth Circuit that it is largely locked into the existing precedent in cases like Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 399 (2012), finding “field preemption” of state immigration laws. The state can now seek a review with the Supreme Court itself.
In the 2-1 opinion, Chief Judge Priscilla Richman upheld the district court’s preliminary injunction, but it is effectively a ruling on the merits since it had to find a substantial likelihood of prevailing on the merits to rule in favor of the federal government. She found that that the detention and removal provisions conflict with federal laws and policies on granting access and asylum status for immigrants pending review. It is a bitter recognition for the state that the open border conditions are the product of federal laws and policies. The majority noted that:
“The Supreme Court in Arizona spent considerable time and ink in explaining how the removal procedures work under federal law. ‘Removal is a civil, not criminal, matter.’ The Texas and federal laws are not congruent on this score. The Supreme Court also explained that ‘[a] principal feature of the [federal] removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.’”
Judge Andrew Oldham dissented and argued that “The people of Texas are entitled to the benefit of state law right up to the point where any particular application of it offends the Supremacy Clause. And Texas state officials should be trusted at least to try sorting those constitutional applications from any potentially unconstitutional ones.”
The rejection of the State War Clause argument is important for future cases in other states. The panel declared:
“Texas has not identified any authority to support its proposition that the State War Clause allows it to enact and enforce state legislation regulating immigration otherwise preempted by federal law. One would expect a contemporary commentator to have noticed such a proposition. Instead, in The Federalist No. 44, James Madison glossed over the portion of the State War Clause at issue here by writing: ‘The remaining particulars of this clause fall within reasonings which are either so obvious, or have been so fully developed, that they may be passed over without remark…’
Thus, we cannot say Texas has persuaded us that the State War Clause demonstrates it is likely to succeed on the merits.”
The State War Clause provides:
“No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”
Texas insisted that the massive numbers coming over the border is an invasion, particularly given the role of cartel gangs in organizing the effort. As I previouslywrote, Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution bars states from conducting foreign policy or performing other federal duties, including the power to “engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”
That language was not the manifestation of a new deal with the states. It was largely taken from the much-maligned Articles of Confederation. Despite wanting to strengthen the powers of a federal government, the Framers incorporated the original recognition that a state can always act in self-defense in the face of an invasion. This argument is usually combined with the Guarantee Clause of Article IV of the Constitution that states that the federal government must protect the states “against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” However, the reference to invasion was clearly used more narrowly to refer to the armed incursion of a state or nation.
In his Report of 1800, James Madison discussed the Guarantee Clause in relation to the enactment of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. He noted that “[i]nvasion is an operation of war.”
What constitutes an “invasion” in a colloquial sense is highly subjective. When Benedict Arnold took 1,600 men over the northern border into Canada in 1775, it was rightfully called an invasion. Yet when millions pour over the southern border, it is called lax enforcement. The legal difference is obvious. One was an organized national force seeking to take over a country. The other is a collection of people from various nations seeking to join this country. Yet, for border states, the distinction easily can be lost in the costs and the crime associated with runaway illegal immigration.
It is clear that the Constitution’s references to “invasion” meant an organized foreign army. When the Constitution was ratified, the federal government had only a small regular army, and border states were legitimately concerned about an invasion by hostile foreign powers or their surrogates.
The failure at our border is a problem of competency rather than the Constitution. If “invasion” can be defined this broadly, any lack of border security could be defined as an invasion, from illegal drug imports to illegal gang activity. The theory has been rejected by various trial and appellate courts. This issue will again be before the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Abbott, in an en banc review in April.
Emilio Tambunga and his daughter, Elisa Tambunga, lost two of their family members in a car wreck with a vehicle driven by a man said to be a human smuggler in Ozona, Texas, on March 13, 2023. (Photo: The Daily Signal)
One year ago, Wednesday, Elisa Tambunga lost her mother and daughter at the hands of a human smuggler.
Rassian Comer is accused of speeding through a red light in Ozona, Texas, crashing into Maria Tambunga’s pickup truck. Seven-year-old Emilia was in the back seat, and both she and her grandmother were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash on March 13, 2023. Comer had 11 illegal aliens in his vehicle and was running from police when he collided with Tambunga’s truck.
“Today marks a year, but the pain grows every day,” Elisa Tambunga told The Daily Signal on Wednesday. “I have vivid flashbacks of how cold they were. How helpless I felt. It plays back for me in slow motion,” the mother said, adding, “That’s why my family and I fight so hard. That is why we haven’t let up.”
About a month after the accident, Tambunga, her father, and her sister traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Republicans’ Congressional Hispanic Conference and with Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In July, Tambunga testified before Congress, sharing her horrific story and calling for border security.
“We live in a constant state of pain and grief,” Tambunga said. “We all know that our mom and Emilia were selfless, caring, and loving, and now we try to carry that on by seeking justice and doing our part to ensure this never happens to another family.”
The grandmother and granddaughter were driving home from a play date with cousins when the crash occurred. Two of the illegal aliens Comer was smuggling were also killed in the car accident.
Gin Jespersen, Tambunga’s sister, lost her mother and her niece that day and told The Daily Signal that Wednesday marks “one year of suffering, crying, and bewilderment as to why [President Joe] Biden and Mayorkas continue to assault their own American citizens at the behest of an ideology to change the fabric of America.”
“It is through death, crime, and injury to Americans like our mom, Maria, and Emilia, 7, that he meets his goal,” she said, adding: “Sinful. Shameful.”
Wednesday was not only the first anniversary of the death of the grandmother and granddaughter, but also the first day of the trial of a man said to be a human smuggler.
Comer, a U.S. citizen, faces multiple charges, including capital murder. The case is being heard in the Crockett County Courthouse, in Ozona, Texas, about 230 miles west of Austin.
Tragically, Maria and Emilia Tambunga are not the only Americans to have died as a result of the crisis along the southern border.
University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley was killed in February while jogging. The lead suspect in herslaying is an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.
On March 6, Travis Wolfe, 12, died after being on life support for three months following a car crash with an illegal immigrant. The illegal alien was driving the wrong way at more than 70 mph in Hazelwood, Missouri.
An illegal alien is charged in the fatal shooting of 2-year-old Jeremy Poou-Caceres in Maryland in February. The little boy and his mom were out for a walk when they were caught up in the crossfire of an illegal alien who was in a car and firing, allegedly at another group of people.
And in October, 46- year-old Francisco Javier Cuellar was found dead in a home in Florida. An illegal alien from Honduras pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in Cuellar’s death.
Since Biden became president in January 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has reported encountering more than 8.8 million illegal aliens on America’s borders and at ports of entry. That total doesn’t include what the agency calls 1.7 million “known gotaways.” CBP also said it has encountered about 1,500 individuals on America’s terrorist watchlist at the border since Biden took office.
While speaking to the press aboard Air Force One on Monday, Biden was asked when “executive action on the border” was coming. The president responded: “I’m counting on the border action happening by itself, the—passing it,” referring to Congress taking action.
So far, Congress has been unable to find agreement on border security legislation. The House passed a border security bill, HR 2, last May, but the Senate has not taken up the bill. The Senate considered a border bill in February, but it failed in the upper chamber with Republicans citing concerns over the bill’s failure to secure the border and instead enshrining open-border policies into law.
On this week’s edition of the “Problematic Women” podcast, we discuss the many lives lost due to America’s current border crisis. Also on today’s show, we discuss the House’s passage of the TikTok bill and the choice before the social media company. Plus, rumors are flying over the whereabouts of Kate Middleton, the princess of Wales. Why do people care so much? We discuss that.
And as always, we’ll be crowning our “Problematic Woman of the Week.”
A U.S. federal judge granted a preliminary injunction preventing Texas from enforcing the SB4 immigration law, which made it a crime to cross the Texas-Mexico border illegally.
U.S. District Judge David Ezra on Thursday halted the lawl’s enforcement, which was set to begin March 5, while the case continues to be litigated in court. Texas is being sued by the federal government and several immigration advocacy organizations. Ezra said in his statement that the federal government “will suffer grave irreparable harm” if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws.
“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in December signed SB4 into law in the state’s most recent effort to stem the unprecedented flow of illegal border crossings coming through the Rio Grande from Mexico. After Abbott’s action, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project sued Texas on behalf of El Paso County. In January, the U.S. Department of Justice filed its own lawsuit with the two having since been combined.
Earlier in the month, Ezra gave indications that he would likely file an injunction when he scolded Texas lead attorney Ryan Walters saying, “A little more care, in fact maybe a lot more care, could have gone into the drafting of this statute.”
Adding that the law could result in every state writing immigration laws for themselves which could “turn us from the United States of America to a confederation of states.”
In his appearance Sunday on NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” embattled U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did what any failed political leader possessing little integrity and less self-awareness would do: He blamed others for his mistakes. Asked whether he bears any responsibility for the nightmare the Biden administration has wrought at the U.S. southern border and beyond, Mayorkas effectively said, don’t look at us.
“It certainly is a crisis and we don’t bear responsibility for a broken system, and we’re dealing a tremendous amount within that broken system,”he told moderator Kristen Welker.
Maybe the secretary should talk to the people living in and around the border towns, local law enforcement, and his own U.S. Border Patrol agents.
“Ask the people at the border in Texas. They think the blame belongs squarely with [the Biden administration],” the FAIR media director told me Monday morning on “Need to Know With Jeff Angelo” on NewsRadio 1040 in Des Moines.
Earlier this month, Mehlman and his traveling companions saw the illegal immigration crisis firsthand at Eagle Pass, a south Texas city of about 28,000 people bordering Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the Rio Grande. As the Dallas Morning News explained, “Eagle Pass, with two small international bridges, features relatively gentle Rio Grande currents that invite migrant crossings. It became a focal point of Texas action in December when the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants over multiple weeks overwhelmed Border Patrol agents and city resources.”
The border town has become a hive of humanity, as its population swells from a wave of illegal aliens pouring over the border on promises of easy entry from President Joe Biden and his nearly impeached Homeland Security chief. U.S. Customs and Border Protection still has yet to post numbers for January apprehensions at the Southwest border, but December saw a new all-time monthly record with more than 300,000 migrant apprehensions. Eagle Pass and its Del Rio sector alone have recorded a whopping 152,252 encounters in the first three months of the federal fiscal year, beginning in October, according to the agency.
Eagle Pass is now ground zero in a standoff between the state of Texas and the Biden administration, just as it is Exhibit A in the administration’s chaotic immigration policy. Gov. Greg Abbott, backed by several states, ordered state National Guard troops to stand guard at Eagle Pass’s gates and erect razor wire to check the invasion. A divided 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court order gave the administration the go-ahead to cut the wire, but Abbott is holding firm, arguing his state is under attack and the president is doing nothing to stop it. Abbott stands on his constitutional obligation to defend and protect his state, and the United States at large, from invasion.
“The message from the Biden administration is: Not only don’t we want to enforce immigration laws, we don’t want anyone else to do it,” Mehlman said.
The immigration reform activist says, from what he saw on his latest trip to Eagle Pass, Abbott’s strategy is working. And, from what’s he’s heard from law enforcement officials, there have been few attempts from federal authorities to remove the deterrents Texas has put in place. Abbott has said his Operation Lone Star has reduced illegal immigration numbers, a claim backed by a new Washington Examiner analysis.
“The numbers show how the percentage of arrests in Texas versus other border states has shifted. In 2021, 69% of illegal immigrant arrests across the southern border occurred in Texas,” the publication reported on Monday.
“As Abbott stepped up security at the start of the Biden administration in 2021, arrests of illegal crossers began to fall and dropped to just 34% last month.”
“This is a manageable problem, as Gov. Abbott has now demonstrated. If you deter people from coming across you will see the results almost immediately,” Mehlman said.
Mehlman does acknowledge, however, that the migrants are simply rerouting to Arizona and California, border states led by leftist governors committed to Biden’s open border policies.
Shifting blame, Mayorkas insists Congress is the “only one who can fix” the five-alarm border fire that he and Biden have dumped gasoline on. The secretary conveniently omits the many Trump-era policies the president has reversed and the orders he could sign to turn the tide of the illegal immigration flood. My colleague Tristan Justice last week detailed the dozens of times Biden has gutted border security since he took the oath of office.
The U.S. Senate’s bad joke of a border deal that died an ignominious death last week would have essentially codified the Biden administration’s awful policy to date. Mehlman and other critics say it would have exacerbated the crisis. He said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his top negotiator, Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., “sold out” the House’s “good” version of the bill, creating a “lose-lose situation” for lawmakers serious about border security.
Meanwhile, last week’s failed effort by House Republicans to impeach Mayorkas is regrouping. Speaker Mike Johnson appears to believe his fellow Republicans will have the numbers —narrowly — this time around as Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., is back to political business after undergoing cancer treatment during last week’s vote.
Mehlman said Mayorkas deserves to be impeached.
“He has undermined the enforcement of our immigration laws, he has violated his oath of office and he’s been derelict in his duty as secretary of Homeland Security,” the Federation for American Immigration Reform official said.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.
When the Rev. Al Sharpton used the word “invasion” to describe the onslaught of migrants at the southern U.S. border on Monday, his MSNBC guest suddenly stopped nodding along. And then the fast blinking began — he was triggered. Because to the American left, the word “invasion” is off-limits and even “violence-inciting.”
But the word — and the concept — are at the heart of what’s happening in Texas, as Gov. Greg Abbott stands up to the Biden administration and its open border policies. He rightly contends that according to the U.S. Constitution, Texas does not merely have the Constitutional power to defend itself — it has a constitutional and moral responsibility to do so.
To qualify as an invader in the constitutional framework requires two qualities: entry into a sovereign territory, and enmity toward the sovereign. An immigrant without enmity is not an invader, nor is an enemy that stays outside our borders.
Consider some examples of what the Founders did consider invaders: foreign powers, pirates, and hostile tribes. In today’s context, a vast multinational criminal cartel whose activities and personnel enter America, harm Americans, destroy or commandeer property, defend routes on private and public lands, coerce American officials through extortion or bribery, and do so with the collaboration and collusion of a foreign state power is absolutely an invader, and would have been immediately recognized as such by the American Founders.
Sharpton wasn’t siding with Abbott, however; he was pushing the new Senate border bill.
But that bill misses the mark almost entirely on all these points. With its stupefying allowance of several million illegal entries per year, its comically constricted “border emergency” framework, its loosening of the asylum process, its billions in funding for the human-trafficking complex, and its wildly permissive structure for allowing the executive branch to override even its own minor strictures, the bill is right now Exhibit A in the contention that the border crisis is a choice made by Washington, D.C.
The border-security crisis is also a choice by Mexico’s own powerholders, stemming from two major motivations. The first motivation is simple: money. We must understand this very clearly: The Mexican state and the Mexican cartels are the same — including the president of Mexico himself.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has repeatedly sided with the criminal cartels, particularly the Sinaloa cartel. This includes his rhetorical generosity toward it, his public visits to honor the aged mother of the jailed drug lord El Chapo, and his political party’s use of its sicario enforcers to kill opposition candidates and rig elections.
AMLO’s policy of “abrazos no balazos” (hugs, not bullets), effectively prevents the use of force against cartel violence; he has handed over civil powers to his own army apparatus, which itself is a major trafficking organization and uses violence against Mexican civilians who defend themselves against cartels; and he has vowed to use the Mexican armed forces to defend Mexican cartels against the Americans.
The second motivation for Mexico City is leverage: leverage versus the United States, which is the only power capable of arresting and disincentivizing Mexico’s slide into narco-state status.
Mexico City understands two things very well: It makes billions off the border-security crisis, especially in human trafficking, and the crisis gives it leverage over U.S. officeholders, especially as the latter come under pressure from the American people to secure the border and defend our communities.
Texas has undertaken a variety of efforts in defense of itself and its citizenry that the federal government has refused to do:
Texas has illuminated the national scope of the border crisis, and invoked the principle of equity within it, by its transportation of migrants to leftist-run localities across the country.
Texas has used its military forces for their proper and primary purpose, in the defense of its own territory and citizenry, with the use of the Texas Military Department, including the personnel of the Texas Army National Guard, in Operation Lone Star.
Texas has built effective border-barrier infrastructure not once, but twice — with its innovative buoy barriers in the Rio Grande, and its barriers on the river’s north bank.
Texas has a new law that allows Texas law enforcement to intercept and de facto deport illegal entrants into Texas.
The federal government ought to be doing all these things — but it is not, and therefore Texas must see to its own self-defense. As Abbott has noted, in failing to do so, the federal government has abdicated its own Constitutional responsibility to the states.
Make no mistake, Texas is faithfully executing the law — both its own, and the Constitution’s, which provides in Article I, Section 10, for a state to defend itself against invasion.
On Thursday, the Oregon Supreme Court upheld a decision by the state’s chief election official to ban 10 Republican state senators from the ballot this fall for walking out of the legislature to protest bills on abortion, guns, and transgenderism.
“Last year’s boycott lasted six weeks — the longest in state history — and paralyzed the legislative session, stalling hundreds of bills,” the Associated Press reported. If enough lawmakers walk out, they can deny the quorum required to legally pass legislation. Through their walkout, Oregon Republicans extracted concessions from Democrats on bills related to firearm transfers and medical procedures for abortion and transgender-identified people.
Voters approved ballot Measure 113 in 2022, which amended the state constitution to boot lawmakers from the ballot for more than 10 unexcused floor absences. Oregon voters passed Ballot Measure 113 after Republican walkouts in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
“We obviously disagree with the Supreme Court’s ruling,” said GOP Senate Minority Leader Tim Knopp, according to the AP. “But more importantly, we are deeply disturbed by the chilling impact this decision will have to crush dissent.”
Democrat lawmakers have also deployed walkouts to block legislation in Texas, Wisconsin, and Indiana. In 2021, Texas House Democrats staged a weeks-long walkout to prevent the passage of a Republican-sponsored election bill. Lawmakers made national headlines for launching the walkout by fleeing the state to Washington D.C., where they met with Vice President Kamala Harris. Democrats in Wisconsin and Indiana also staged legislative walkouts to delay progress on union-busting right-to-work bills.
In the last few months, Democrat U.S. House Rep. Jamal Bowman also received a slap on the wrist for pulling a fire alarm amid Democrats’ attempts to delay a vote on unfunded federal spending.
Stripping Oregon Republicans from ballot access marks the latest episode in a decades-long saga to eradicate the state’s political minority. Conservatives in Oregon have become so disillusioned by the leftist state government that activists are petitioning to redraw the state’s rural eastern counties into Idaho.
Just last year, Oregon Democrats rubber-stamped aggressive laws restricting guns and water use while expanding abortion and transgender interventions. Last year, lawmakers in the Idaho House of Representatives formally approved talks to annex disenchanted neighboring counties from Oregon.
Ballot bans have quickly become Democrats’ central campaign strategy, with former President Donald Trump disqualified as a candidate in Colorado and Maine. Challenges to Trump appearing on ballots have been filed in at least 35 states and remain unresolved in 16. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an appeal of Colorado’s court-ordered Trump removal next week.
Democrats are also working to keep Robert F. Kennedy Jr. off primary and state ballots, fearing his effect on Joe Biden’s re-election chances.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday that he will send members of the Florida National Guard and the Florida State Guard to assist Texas in its efforts at the southern border. Florida will offer a battalion of National Guard members to be deployed based on the needs in Texas, said DeSantis, who last month dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.
The deployments join the more than 90 officers from Florida’s Highway Patrol, Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, and the Department of Law Enforcement who have already been deployed, and DeSantis noted in a statement that more law enforcement resources are coming.
“States have every right to defend their sovereignty and we are pleased to increase our support to Texas as the Lone Star State works to stop the invasion across the border,” he said. “Our reinforcements will help Texas to add additional barriers, including razor wire along the border. We don’t have a country if we don’t have a border.”
Maj. Gen. John Haas, the adjutant general of Florida, said the deployments are not a new mission, as Florida has supported border security missions in Texas, including federal and state deployments.
“Last spring the Florida National Guard was one of the first in the nation to deploy rotations of soldiers to support Operation Lone Star in Texas,” Haas said. “We have proudly and readily supported our own state’s efforts in similar roles here in Florida.”
“Florida State Guard Director Mark Thieme said his branch is prepared to stand “shoulder-to-shoulder” with its state agency partners in Texas who are “grappling with an unprecedented surge of illegal immigration along their border. The Florida State Guard is postured to deliver rapid emergency response, public safety operations, and humanitarian assistance — wherever the need arises.”
DeSantis’ office noted that since 2021, when President Joe Biden took office, the state has been providing direct law enforcement and military assistance to Texas, including with the Florida National Guard in support of the Texas Military Department in several missions, including with roving patrols, engineer assistance, and observation points.
Further, the Florida Highway Patrol has made contact with nearly 150,000 illegal aliens while conducting over 27,000 traffic stops, resulting in 2,102 human smuggling or human trafficking charges with 2,278 overall arrests, the governor’s office said.
It was also noted that the federal Customs and Border Patrol recorded 2.5 million encounters at the border in fiscal year 2023, including 169 people on the terrorism watchlist trying to come into the U.S. across the southern border.
“More than 10 million illegal immigrants have crossed the border, including more than 1.7 million known got-aways,” the statement said, adding that in December alone, “roughly 260 million lethal doses of fentanyl were seized at the border.”
If only Biden was as ferocious with Iran as he seems to be fighting against Texas’ border policy.
GOVERNOR GREG ABBOTT TO TUCKER: WE ARE ‘PREPARED’ FOR CONFLICT WITH BIDEN REGIME OVER BORDER – 10 STATES HAVE SENT THEIR NATIONAL GUARDS TO DEFEND TEXAS AGAINST INVASION (VIDEO)
Texas Governor Greg Abbott told Tucker Carlson Friday afternoon that he is fully prepared for conflict with federal authorities and that states have already sent their National Guards and other law enforcement to defend the border.
Tucker started the interview by asking Abbott what he would do if the Regime federalized the Texas National Guard. He responded they would attempt to defy the Regime and continue building barriers, including razor wire, and expand the denial of illegal entry into the state of Texas.
He went on to tell Tucker that 10 of the 25 GOP-led states pledging to defend Texas have sent their national guards to the Texas border, and more will follow soon. He did not specify which states had deployed forces. See and READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told Newsmax on Tuesday that the Border Patrol agents in Texas who are taking down the razor wire that the state put up to keep out illegal migrants “do not like” what the Biden administration is ordering them to do.
“I don’t think there’s tension between the actual people on the ground,” Paxton said on Newsmax’s “National Report.” “The Border Patrol do not like what they’re being forced to do. They do it because they’re forced by [President] Joe Biden and his administration. On day one of his administration, he said that he was not going to deport people anymore and ever since then, we’ve been in litigation with them over immigration, and he’s continued to let people in. But that’s not what law enforcement wants. I can tell you nobody wants what he wants.‘
“Basically, he’s decided, to the detriment of the American public, that he’s going to bring these people in, work with the cartels every day, because the cartels make money off every person coming through and he’s making it easier for them because they don’t have to hide anymore. They just turn themselves in. It also allows the cartels to import more drugs, so it’s been very profitable and good for the cartels. It has not been good for Americans because of the increased crime, the risk of terrorism and the cost that every state is going to bear as a result of this.”
Texas has continued to install razor wire at the U.S.-Mexico border, even as federal agents were given the go-ahead by the Supreme Court last week to cut it down. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called the razor wire an “effective deterrent against the illegal border crossings” and vowed to “continue to deploy this razor wire to repel illegal immigration.”
Paxton on Tuesday also commented on the state’s fight with the federal government over Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, which the Biden administration has sought unsuccessfully to enter since Texas cordoned it off.
“This is property owned by the government in Texas,” Paxton said. “The federal government has no right to come and take over that property — which is used for recreational purposes, that’s being funded by tax dollars in Texas — and use it as a way to increase the number of people crossing the border and potentially, as we know, increasing crime in the area, and so, absolutely we’re going to keep them out. They have no right to take it over.
“It’s only a 2.5-mile area. It’s interesting to me that there’s 1,260 something miles of border and they’re mad about 2.5 miles when they’re letting people in all over the place. So, it’s an interesting fight that doesn’t seem, in my opinion, to have a lot of purpose for them. It has a lot of purpose for us because this is a park that residents use for recreational purposes.”
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
More than two dozen Republican attorneys general sent a stern message to President Joe Biden and his border czar, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, on Monday: If you’re not going to enforce the law at the southern border, then “get out of the way so Texas can.”
The letter, spearheaded by Iowa AG Brenna Bird and signed by 25 other AGs and the GOP leaders of the Arizona legislature, followed a similar letter from Republican governors last week showing solidarity for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s waging a two-front battle: against Biden in the courtroom and what Abbott calls an “invasion” of illegals pouring through the border.
Monday’s six-page letter also comes after the Biden administration’s release Friday that December set a record with more than 302,000 migrant encounters at the southern border, part of a “staggering” and record-setting 371,036 overall encounters nationwide. It also comes as myriad Democrat lawmakers and leaders call on Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard, a move Abbott said Friday would be “boneheaded.”
“What you should do is simple: enforce the law and protect the border,” the letter stated. “And despite some recent suggestions that you should nationalize control of the Texas National Guard as a ruse, we would like to remind you that you cannot do so without legal authority that you currently lack. If you cannot bring yourselves to enforce the law, get out of the way so Texas can.”
Further, the letter says Border Patrol “used a forklift to lift the wire to let more than 300 people crossing the Rio Grande into Texas.”
The letter also addresses the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that allowed the Biden administration to remove razor wire deployed at the orders of Abbott, but it did not issue a cease-and-desist to Texas.
“As lawyers yourselves, you must know that reports that Texas is ignoring or ‘defying’ the Supreme Court are wrong, either misunderstanding or deliberately misstating the law,” the AGs wrote. “The Supreme Court’s order did not tell Texas that it could or could not do anything. Texas should be applauded for continuing to try to protect the border despite the federal government now, again, being able to try to destroy the barriers Texas builds.”
The letter goes on to assert that Texas and other states “must be able to defend themselves from invasion.”
At least one Biden administration official agrees. A Customs and Border Patrol senior official told Fox News that the relationship between Border Patrol and Texas law enforcement “remains strong.”
“Bottom line: Border Patrol has no plans to remove infrastructure (c-wire) placed by Texas along the border,” the official said. “Our posture remains the same. If we need to access an area for emergency response, we will do so. When that happens, we will coordinate with Texas (Department of Public Safety) and (Texas Military Dept.).”
A talking point cropping up on social media and press contends that Texas Governor Greg Abbott is “ignoring” or “defying” the Supreme Court by continuing to erect fencing along the U.S.-Mexican border. This is wrong.
Abbott can’t ignore the Supreme Court because Texas wasn’t ordered to do anything. SCOTUS vacated an order against the Department of Homeland Security [sic] that stopped the Feds from cutting down razor fencing along the border. Nothing says that Texas can’t erect the fencing.
Though, you must marvel at the breathtaking audacity of Democrats suddenly treating the court’s (non-existent) words as if they were sacred text. This very week, President Joe Biden again ignored the court, rolling out yet another iteration of his unconstitutional student “loan forgiveness” program. Biden habitually circumvents, ignores, defies, attacks, and demeans SCOTUS — and Democrats cheer him on along the way. Senate leaders and “dark money” fake media organizations like ProPublica have poured millions into delegitimizing and smearing the court to undermine its authority.
Now, it is true that Biden has the power to ratchet up the fight, take federal control of the border, and implement any policy he desires — or, more specifically, any non-policy he desires. The Biden administration is standing in the way of Texas’ efforts to enforce state and federal law. Once that happens, we can have our constitutional crisis.
As a political matter, the case tells us that the border mayhem is not only a matter of historic incompetence but is also driven by ideology. Many Democrats believe limiting illegal immigration is immoral. They believe anyone who wants to walk over the border should be able to do so without any incumbrances.
This week, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that razorwire at the southern border is ineffective and gets “in the way” of law enforcement. I’m no expert on border control, admittedly, but I am relatively certain that any fence is better than what is happening now.
A few years back, Nancy Pelosi distilled the left’s view on physical barriers when she called them an “immorality,” the “least effective way to protect the border,” and too expensive. “I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else,” the then House Speaker said. None of that is true, either. The idea that real fences and walls can’t mitigate the movement of people is undermined by looking at the entirety of history. The least effective way is probably what we’re doing now.
The “something else,” of course, is meant to call you a racist. The reality is that Mexico is the top origin country for legal immigrants. Most Americans still see immigration as a net positive. The lawlessness at the border, and now in major cities, is helping undermine that sentiment.
One of the vital jobs of the federal government is to protect the sovereignty, borders, and citizens of the nation — even more important than creating “book ban” czars or banning Zyn packets. But not only has Biden abdicated his responsibility on that front, he wants to stop others from doing their duty, as well. But sometimes, it seems like the lawlessness is the point.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement on Wednesday asserting that the Lone Star State has a constitutional right to defend its sovereignty in the wake of an invasion facilitated by President Biden’s open border policies.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now,” Abbott wrote. “President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them. The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration.”
According to the Washington Examiner, more than 10 million illegal immigrants have been apprehended by U.S. border officials since Biden assumed the presidency in January 2021. Those figures don’t even include the estimated 1.7 million “gotaways” who evaded capture upon illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
In his statement, Abbott slammed Biden for facilitating the ongoing invasion and noted how the president’s “refusal to protect the States” has resulted in “more than 6 million illegal immigrants” traversing Texas’ border alone. That figure is greater than the population of more than 30 states.
The Texas governor further underscored the federal government’s obligation to defend states from invasion and the states’ right to defend their sovereignty from outside forces, citing Article IV, § 4, and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, of the U.S. Constitution. While the former stipulates that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” the latter recognizes “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”
“James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border,” Abbott wrote. “The failure of the Biden Administration to fulfill the duties imposed by Article IV, § 4 has triggered Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which reserves to this State the right of self-defense.”
“For these reasons, I have already declared an invasion under Article I, § 10, Clause 3 to invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself,” he continued. “That authority is the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary. The Texas National Guard, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other Texas personnel are acting on that authority, as well as state law, to secure the Texas border.”
Abbott’s remarks appear to come in response to a Monday decision by the U.S. Supreme Court allowing the Biden administration to authorize Customs and Border Protection officials to cut razor wire installed along the border by Texas to stymie illegal immigration. Five of the court’s nine justices sided with the administration, including Republican-appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
By a vote of 5-4, with two conservative justices joining the liberals, the Supreme Court has ruled that federal agents can cut razor wire installed along the Texas-Mexico border while a lawsuit over the wire continues. The Border Patrol Union and its agents who have spoken to reporters favor the razor wire installation because it is working in that section of the state in keeping migrants, criminals, and fentanyl out, but that apparently doesn’t matter to the court.
While the emergency appeal of a lower court ruling upholding the action by Texas did not require an explanation for their votes, it likely is because the majority felt the Constitution grants power to the federal government over individual states when it comes to border control. The obvious question which the court did not address: why is the federal government not enforcing immigration laws which migrants are breaking to enter the country?
Suppose a Mexican army — no, forget an army — suppose a ragtag bunch of drug dealers decided to invade Texas, the governor acted to stop them — including installing more razor wire — and the Biden administration did nothing to stop them? Would the High Court be OK with that? The effect is the same as if an army of any kind was crossing the border.
How many more murders, rapes and drug deaths are to be tolerated before the administration begins to enforce laws passed by Congress and signed by presidents of both parties? If this is not a violation of Biden’s Oath of Office, what would qualify?
A statement from White House spokesperson Angelo Fernandez Hernandez is laughable: “Texas’ political stunts, like placing razor wire near the border, simply makes it harder and more dangerous for frontline personnel to do their jobs.” Except, as anyone can plainly see from watching pictures of tens of thousands of migrants streaming across the border, they are not doing their jobs because the Biden administration won’t let them.
Even President Biden recently stated the obvious when he said after months of denials by himself and his Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that the bord er is not secure. If his previous statements weren’t lies, we need a new definition of the word.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said in response to the court ruling that the razor wire is an “effective deterrent” to the illegal crossings and “I will continue to defend Texas’ constitutional authority to secure the border.”
Local police and the Department of Public Safety officers have been arresting migrants on trespassing charges, but ultimately they will be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which is likely to continue releasing them into the country. From there they will likely head to already overcrowded cities seeking low-paying jobs, taking playground and other spaces from school children and in the case of New York, depositing human waste in parks, in the streets and in some cases in cups they leave on the doorsteps of local residents.
That this will — and already is — a major issue in this year’s presidential race is clear. According to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll. “More voters pointed to immigration than to inflation as a top policy concern. The survey found that 35 percent of respondents listed immigration as their paramount concern among an array of issues, with inflation in a close second, named by 32 percent of respondents.”
Beware Democrats. You are on the wrong side of this issue.
The U.S. Department of State reportedly hired German censors to train American teachers on how to facilitate so-called anti-disinformation efforts in the classroom.
Documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Media Research Center (MRC) and shared exclusively with The Daily Wire reveal that the State Department paid for trainings for hundreds of teachers “created mostly by German ‘disinformation’ activists.” The “Medialogues on Propaganda,” which featured 11 online training meetings between June 2021 and April 2022 and was attended by some 700 teachers, was funded by a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.
“The intent was to train teachers to ‘inoculate’ students against disinformation that train them in ‘media literacy,’” The Daily Wire reported. “The State Department sessions were used by its activist organizers to promote products from their for-profit ‘partner,’ Ad Fontes, as well as NewsGuard.”
Ad Fontes is a for-profit firm founded in 2018 that advises advertisers, online platforms, and educators about which websites to either boycott or censor. While the company claims to be impartial, its recommendations show otherwiseby disproportionately targeting conservative media as outlets for clients to avoid.
NewsGuard is a similar “disinformation” group backed by federal grant money. It operates as a browser extension that rates the credibility of news organizations and has been deployed in classrooms. A study published last month by the Media Research Center shows NewsGuard’s credibility ratings “overwhelmingly favored left-leaning outlets over right-leaning ones.” Prominent examples of NewsGuard’s biased ratings include perfect grades for legacy outlets that botched the Hunter Biden laptop story while giving failing grades to conservative websites that got it right.
The federal government’s use of taxpayer funds to back NewsGuard is the subject of a lawsuit from The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas, which are collectively suing the State Department to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history.” The case exposes federal censorship efforts beyond the dramatic discoveries in the pending Supreme Court case of Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).
The State Department did not respond to The Federalist’s repeated inquiries about why the agency did not shut down the propagandist trainings by German censors.
The government trainings were reportedly run by Germany’s University of Würzburg’s Media Education & Educational Technology Lab and the University of Rhode Island’s Media Education Lab with Media Literacy Now (MLN), a non-profit group.
“MLN lobbies for mandatory training in schools to fight ‘misinformation’ and ‘online radicalization,’ boasting that it has helped convince 18 states to make laws on media literacy training,” the Daily Wire reported. “And while the Rhode Island Lab wrote an entire report on the importance of ‘media literacy’ without ever defining it, MLN had spoken more clearly, calling it a ‘tool to create the society we all deserve: one that nurtures racial equity, social justice, and true democracy. Media literacy equals cultural change.’”
University of Rhode Island Communications Professor Renee Hobbs is an MLN advisory board member and the founder of the Rhode Island Lab. According to the Daily Wire, Hobbs previously pressed for $60 million in subsidies for “anti-disinformation work like hers — legislation whose momentum rested on the idea that Russians caused Trump to win in 2016, itself a conspiracy.”
Hobbs played host to the state-sponsored “disinformation” seminars while also serving as chair of a National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) group encouraging teachers to shift their focus to “consumerism and economic injustice.” Hobbs’ Rhode Island Lab also once used a fake, satirical Lego set to encourage teachers to hold student discussions about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“When asked why the State Department would fund a propaganda seminar aimed at Americans,” the Wire reported, “the State Department told The Daily Wire that with its $30,000 grant to Media Literacy Now, ‘the U.S. Embassy in Germany supported the participation of German participants in the media literacy program you are inquiring about.’”
The current U.S. ambassador to Germany, Amy Gutmann, was sworn in back in April 2022, just as the State Department trainings were purportedly ending. Before becoming Biden’s ambassador in Berlin, however, Gutmann was president of the University of Pennsylvania since 2004. The Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement was established under Gutmann’s tenure, where about ten classified documents were discovered from Biden’s time as vice president that included “top-secret material.” Biden was paid a nearly seven-figure salary from the Ivy League university despite rare school appearances.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
“We need immigrants in this country,” Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler said Thursday during a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement hearing. “Our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants — many illegal immigrants.”
“The fact is, the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level,” he continued. Nadler is adamantly anti-life and given that abortion is responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn American children, it’s unlikely that he’s sincerely concerned about the United States’ replacement rates.
Nadler’s remarks recall the Democratic party’s past reasoning for supporting slavery. Federalist Senior Editor Mark Hemingway pointed out that Democrats in 1823 were backing slavery because if there were no slaves, “Who would pick our cotton?” Today, Democrats are making the argument that low-wage working illegal migrants are necessary to pick “our vegetables.”
Another striking comparison is the Democrats’ past support of slave traders and their current aiding of human trafficking at the southern border. As Federalist CEO Sean Davis explained, “Before the Civil War, Democrats bought their slaves from human traffickers who kidnapped them and then shipped them across the Atlantic. In 2023, they use cartels to smuggle illegal immigrants across a border Democrats refuse to close.”
Indeed, human trafficking at our southern border is now a multi-billion dollar business, and Democrats have no plan to stop the abuse. In December alone, over 300,000 illegal immigrants crossed into the United States.
Now, illegal immigration isn’t just a problem for border states but the entire nation. Massive influxes of aliens are now invading places like New York City and Chicago, putting massive strain on city resources. Meanwhile, the fentanyl crisis created by the open southern border is taking countless American lives in all corners of the country — both urban and rural.
This week, citizens were given some hope after the Texas Military Department took over a 2.5-mile long stretch along the Rio Grande River, supposedly to stop illegal immigration in the high-traffic crossing area and keep out federal border officials who “perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings in the park and greater Eagle Pass area.”
However, as my colleague Jordan Boyd explained, the move appears to be nothing more than political theater. “Yet despite the addition of personnel, barriers, gates, concertina wire, and military Humvees’ to the area,” Boyd wrote, Texas Gov. “Abbott has not authorized the Texas National Guard to detain and deport illegal immigrants, who are still being turned over to Border Patrol for processing and, in most cases, release.”
“So, while the move prompted an outcry from the Biden administration and federal border officials who say the state’s interference prevents them from doing their jobs,” she added, “Abbott’s move won’t fundamentally change the dynamic at the border.”
In other words, the border remains open, and the drug and human trafficking crises caused by it rage on. But, according to Nadler, it’s all worth it because the vegetable industry needs people to pick produce for exploitative slave wages.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
The Department of Justice has renewed its push for the Supreme Court to act on an ongoing legal dispute between Texas and the federal government after a dramatic move in which Texas seized control of a park near the border and blocked Border Patrol from entering.
“Texas’s new actions since the government’s filing demonstrate an escalation of the State’s measures to block Border Patrol’s ability to patrol or even to surveil the border and be in a position to respond to emergencies,” the DOJ told the high court in an overnight supplemental filing on Friday.
The Texas National Guard seized Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas and set up razor wire and fences to block off the area. Eagle Pass has been one of the hottest spots of migrant crossings in the three-year border crisis and Shelby Park is a key staging area for processing during the enormous migrant surges the state has seen.
In a statement, the Texas Military Dept. said it has maintained a presence in the park since 2021, including with security points and temporary barriers.
“The current posture is to prepare for future illegal immigrant surges and to restrict access to organizations that perpetuate illegal immigrant crossings in the park and greater Eagle Pass area,” it said.
Jan 11 2024: Texas troopers secure Shelby Park near Eagle Pass. (Fox News)
Senior Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources later confirmed that Border Patrol is being blocked at two areas of operation in Eagle Pass and said that agents pulled resources to avoid a confrontation. In the overnight filing, the DOJ says Border Patrol learned of the new barriers late on Wednesday and says that the barriers stop Border Patrol from reaching the Rio Grande Reiver in certain areas.
“It also includes the staging area that Border Patrol has used to evaluate and begin inspecting migrants that it has apprehended along this stretch of the border,” the administration said.
The government says that Border Patrol had requested access to use a boat ramp and to access the staging area but were refused access.
The move ramps up an ongoing dispute between Texas and the administration over Texas’ setting up of razor wire along the southern border to stop illegal crossings. The Biden administration was recently blocked by an appeals court from cutting or damaging the wire, and asked the Supreme Court to intervene as a result. The administration said the wire was preventing agents from apprehending migrants and accessing parts of the border.
The latest filing comes as part of the case, with the DOJ pointing to claims Texas had previously made that agents could access the border via boat or road without cutting the wire, and said that now the one safe and operationally practical boat ramp was blocked.
“Because Border Patrol can no longer access or view this stretch of the border, Texas has effectively prevented Border Patrol from monitoring the border to determine whether a migrant requires the emergency aid that the court of appeals expressly excepted from the injunction,” it argues.
The filing argues that the new actions have “changed the situation on the ground from the account in prior filings in this Court, including Texas’s opposition.’
“Those developments reinforce the need for this Court to vacate the court of appeals’ injunction, and to do so as soon as possible,” the DOJ says. “This Court should vacate the injunction pending appeal in order to restore Border Patrol’s access to the border it is charged with patrolling and the migrants it is responsible for apprehending, inspecting, and processing.”
It’s one of several ongoing disputes between the Biden administration and Texas over the southern border. The government has sued Texas over its establishment of buoys along the Rio Grande and a recent anti-illegal immigration law that allows for state and local police to arrest illegal immigrants.
Texas has stood by its policies, saying that it is acting where the Biden administration has failed to secure the border.
“Texas is holding the line at our southern border with miles of additional razor wire and anti-climb barriers to deter and repel the record-high levels of illegal immigration invited by President Biden’s reckless open border policies. Instead of enforcing federal immigration laws, the Biden Administration allows unfettered access for Mexican cartels to smuggle people into our country,” Abbott spokesperson Renae Eze said on Thursday.
Meanwhile, the Border Patrol Union backed Abbott, saying he is enhancing operations, not harming them.
“His seizing control of Shelby Park allows our agents to deploy to troubled spots that experience high numbers of gotaways. Governor Abbott’s actions should be seen as a force multiplier,” National Border Patrol Council Brandon Judd said in a statement.
Fox News Bill Melugin and Griff Jenkins contributed to this report.
Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Fox News Digital, primarily covering immigration and border security.
The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.
The three are suing to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” says the lawsuit. It exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).
This lawsuit alleges the State Department is illegally using a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike. Other recent investigations have also found government counterterrorism resources and tactics being used to shape American public opinion and policy.
Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”
This is just the latest in a series of major investigations and court cases in the last year to uncover multiple federal censorship efforts laundered through private cutouts. The “Twitter Files,” a series of investigative journalist reports, uncovered that dozens of federal agencies pressured virtually all social media monopolies to hide and punish tens of millions of posts and users.
Missouri v. Bidenfound this federal censorship complex has included government officials changing the content moderation and user policies of social media monopolies through threats to destroy their business models. House of Representatives investigations have uncovered U.S. national security and spy agencies creating “private” organizations to circumvent the Constitution’s prohibition on federal officials abridging Americans’ speech. These false-front organizations deliberately avoid creating records subject to transparency laws and congressional oversight, public records show.
Congressional investigations in November revealed that federal officials have specifically targeted The Federalist’s reporting for internet censorship.
In which Sean Davis was censored for saying the best evidence against the integrity of the election was the fact that Democrats/media/Big Tech were censoring anyone who observed their censorship efforts related to the election. pic.twitter.com/r6NdbnSx1f
‘Coordinating the Government’s Efforts to Silence Speech’
The Fifth Circuit refrained from stopping the State Department’s participation in the “vast censorship enterprise” that Murthy v. Missouri uncovered because, the court said, it hadn’t seen enough evidence of that agency’s involvement. This new lawsuit from Texas, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire provides such evidence.
Even though Congress and the Constitution have banned the federal government from silencing Americans, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has morphed into “the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts to silence speech,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit names as defendants the U.S. State Department, GEC, and multiple department officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. GEC originated as a counterterrorism agency created by an executive order from President Obama.
Through GEC, the State Department evaluated more than 365 different tools for scrubbing the internet of disfavored information, the lawsuit says. The department also pays millions to develop multiple internet disinformation “tools.” It also runs tests on censorship technologies and awards government prize money to those most effective at controlling what Americans say and hear online, the lawsuit says.
State then shares these censorship technologies with companies, favored media outlets, academics, and government agencies. It markets these government-funded censorship technologies to Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. The tools included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says.
At least two of the censorship tools the State Department has funded, developed, and awarded have targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, the lawsuit says. NewsGuard and GDI wield these tools developed with government assistance to deprive government-criticizing news outlets, including The Federalist and The Daily Wire, of operating funds.
They do this by rating conservative outlets poorly, falsely claiming these outlets purvey “disinformation” and are “unreliable.” That deprives leftists’ media competitors of high-value ad dollars from the big companies that use these rating systems. Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon.
“Advertising companies that subscribe to GDI’s blacklist refuse to place ads with disfavored news sources, cutting off revenue streams and leaving the blacklisted outlets unable to compete with the approved ‘low risk’ media outlets — often legacy news,” the lawsuit says.
Boosting Disinformation While Claiming the Opposite
Ratings companies like NewsGuard and GDI base their low ratings of outlets like The Federalist at least in part on politically charged “fact checks” of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles. While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets. The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 “riskiest” list.
All of the outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.
This federal censorship-industrial complex’s numerous disinformation operations include the Hamilton 68 effort. In contrast, The Federalist not only reported all these stories accurately from the beginning but for most led the reporting pack that proved it. GDI rated The Daily Wire’s “risk level” as “high” and The Federalist’s “risk level” as “maximum.”
While technologies and enterprises the State Department promotes push corporate media’s biggest purveyors of propaganda, they also “blacklist” The Federalist and Daily Wire, the lawsuit says, “negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying the Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.” Microsoft, for example, uses NewsGuard technology “to train Bing Chat.”
The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks a court declaration that the State Department’s funding, testing, pressuring, and promoting of internet censorship tools is unconstitutional and an order that it end.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
Democrats are finally facing their day of reckoning with black voters, and their waning support for President Joe Biden is only half the story. A recent New York Times/Sienna poll reveals that Biden barely leads among nonwhite voters under 45 in a 2024 election matchup against former President Donald Trump. The same nonwhite voters reported backing Biden by almost 40 points in the 2020 election.
The hidden story is that Trump is capturing more than 22 percent support among black voters. The NYT article said a Republican winning over so many black voters “would be unprecedented in the post-Civil Rights Act era.”
Why Are Blacks Finally Breaking Ranks?
Black Americans are beginning to understand that the years of promises of better days have resulted in decades of broken promises. A recent Wall Street Journal article tells the story of Michelle Smith, who lives in North Philadelphia. She works two jobs as a black single mother with three teenage boys. She describes her disappointment in Biden, whom she supported strongly in 2020. Despite efforts by the Democrats to spend more money on advertising, voter canvassing, and educating voters in black communities, Smith said the Democrats might not be able to convince her to vote. “I think I’m not going to vote, period,” she said.
Smith is not alone. There is a growing recognition that Democrats have duped black Americans. And as they increasingly realize it, Democrats will be left saying, “Katy, bar the door,” because their party will begin to implode.
Ironically, the modern-day Democrat Party has essentially achieved the same objectives as the Civil War-era Democrat Party. It has unfortunately taken 60 years for black Americans to realize what has happened to them and their culture. It’s hard to keep blaming Republicans when Democrats run major cities, school systems, and police departments. In many cases, black Democrats run these institutions.
Black Decline After Civil Rights
The status of black Americans today in Democrat-controlled cities and states is essentially the worst it has been since before the Civil Rights era. For example, during slavery, Democrats restricted access to opportunities that allowed slaves to obtain an education. Today, in nearly every major city controlled by Democrats, literacy rates are abysmal. Local and national Democrat Party leaders have severely restricted access to private or charter schools.
Proponents of apartheid used segregation as a cruel psychological tool. Democrats, however, are bringing segregation back in style. In Democrat Party strongholds, such as American universities, the country is witnessing the practice of segregated dorms and graduation ceremonies.
One of the most devastating changes that the Democrat Party facilitated involves the destruction of the nuclear family in black communities. During the era of slavery, masters would break up families after wives bore children. After the Civil War and for 100 years afterward, most black children grew up in traditional two-parent families.
It wasn’t until Democrats introduced and heavily marketed social welfare programs to black Americans in the 1960s that two-parent families began to erode drastically. Those programs ushered in a cultural transformation. Over 50 years, black families fell from having two parents in 80 percent of homes. Today, approximately 80 percent of black children grow up in fatherless homes.
Democrats Harm Black Americans
For the Democrats, family disruption and government dependency were the objectives from the beginning. If that wasn’t their intention, then why hasn’t there been one national initiative to reverse the trend?
In 1957, Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson, D-Texas, then the pro-segregationist Senate majority leader, knew blacks would eventually get the right to vote. When speaking to then-Sen. Richard Russell Jr., D-Ga., regarding the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Johnson said, “These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference.”
Democrat Party leaders and their left-wing friends in academia and the media convinced blacks (and the general public) that Republicans were the racists. They were, according to the effective narrative, indifferent to poor people. They wanted to keep blacks as second-class citizens. Ironically, Republicans voted to support the Civil Rights Act in greater numbers than Democrats.
Their goal was to have black Americans switch their votes from Republicans to Democrats.
Black Americans Coming Home to the GOP
As we look forward to the 2024 election season, the NYT/Sienna poll is not the only one raising the alarm. A recent Fox News poll revealed that 26 percent of black Americans support Trump for president in 2024 over Biden. In the past 12 months, black elected officials switched from the Democrat Party to the Republican Party in southern states such as Georgia and Texas. For the first time in 140 years, Alabama voters elected a black man to the state House of Representatives as a Republican.
In statewide elections, voters in Virginia and North Carolina elected black Americans to the No. 2 leadership position as lieutenant governors. Although Daniel Cameron did not win his bid for Kentucky governor, we should expect to see more black Republicans running for statewide and federal offices.
Even the legacy media won’t be able to spin and hide this major political shift.
Kendall Qualls is an Executive Faculty-in-Residence at the Crown College School of Business and Founder/President of the non-profit foundation TakeCharge. Qualls was a candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor of Minnesota in the 2022 election cycle.
Texas voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot proposition Tuesday establishing a billion-dollar state-managed energy fund to bolster natural gas power plant infrastructure.
Proposition 7 to create the so-called Texas Energy Fund passed in a 65% to 35% vote with more than 2.5 million ballots cast, according to the latest data compiled by the Texas Secretary of State’s office. The ballot measure — which was supported by the energy industry, but opposed by environmentalists — sets aside $5 billion to guarantee low interest loans for new dispatchable power generation in the state.
“TXOGA is pleased to see infrastructure propositions to expand water, electricity and broadband pass with overwhelming support from voters,” Todd Staples, the president of the Texas Oil & Gas Association, said in a statement Tuesday evening. “By voting to approve these propositions, Texans are ensuring that the Lone Star State continues to be the best place to live, work, play and raise a family.”
He added that Proposition 7 will help “strengthen the reliability of our electric grid by ensuring it performs no matter the weather as well as increase the supply of electricity by encouraging additional generation.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation teeing up the vote Tuesday. After the measure passed, he applauded the action, saying it will “strengthen our state power grid.” (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The measure is the final step to enact Senate Bill 2627, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in July.
Under the bill, loans financed by the Texas Energy Fund must have a 20-year term and interest rate of 3%, and can be used either to upgrade existing dispatchable power generation increasing capacity by at least 100 megawatts (MW) or to construct new power generation with a capacity of at least 100 MW. A natural gas power plant with a capacity of 100 MW can power tens of thousands of homes.
The effort to create incentives for power companies to expand natural gas power generation was designed to address growing concerns that the state’s power sector doesn’t have an adequate energy generation that can be quickly dispatched to provide electricity during emergency peak periods.
According to former Public Utility Commission Chair Peter Lake, the state’s dispatchable power supply grew only 1.5% between 2008 and 2020, while, in that same timeframe, the Texas population grew 24%, meaning demand is outpacing supply. The concern is particularly elevated because of Texas’ growing reliance on green energy sources like wind and solar, which aren’t dispatachable, and are intermittent, meaning they are reliant on weather conditions.
A power generating station near Austin, Texas, on July 11, 2022. (Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“The urgency to move forward with meaningful electric market reforms that will incentivize the development of dispatchable generation remains extremely high,” Pablo Vegas, the current president and CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said earlier this year.
In 2022, Texas generated 26% of all U.S. wind-generated electricity and has led the nation in that category for 17 consecutive years, federal data showed. Natural gas, though, still produces by far the largest share of electricity generation in the state.
In addition to the Texas Oil and Gas Association, ConocoPhillips, Texas Association of Manufacturers, Texas Pipeline Association and Valero Energy Corporation supported Proposition 7. The Sierra Club, Environment Texas, Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance and Texas Consumer Association opposed it.
“We need, and Texans want, more clean energy, not less. There is strong support for more wind and solar energy, more battery storage, more energy efficiency, and more interconnection with the national grid,” said Luke Metzger, the executive director of Environment Texas. “Unfortunately, the Legislature ignored these solutions to strengthen our electric grid while protecting consumers and the environment.”
Thomas Catenacci is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
A federal judge on Monday ordered the Biden administration to stop cutting razor wire on fences along the southern border in Texas meant to stop illegal migrant crossings.
Judge Alia Moses of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on Monday ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stop “disassembling, degrading, tampering” miles of razor wire running along the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass. The temporary order is a result of a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, arguing that federal officials said they had the authority to destroy state property “to allow [illegal] aliens to enter & be processed.”
Paxton asked the court for an immediate injunction last week, noting in his request to the court that “federal agents escalated matters, trading bolt cutters for an industrial-strength telehandler forklift to dismantle [Texas’] border fence.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in the lawsuit that “federal agents used hydraulic-powered pallet forks to rip [Texas’] fence … out of the ground, holding it suspended in the air in order to wave more than 300 migrants illegally into Texas.” (Benjamin Lowy for Fox News Digital)
“Federal agents used hydraulic-powered pallet forks to rip [Texas’] fence – concertina wire, fencing posts, clamps, and all – out of the ground, holding it suspended in the air in order to wave more than 300 migrants illegally into Texas,” the motion for a temporary injunction reads.
Last week, DHS released a statement that said border agents “have a responsibility under federal law” to protect migrants from being injured regardless of their legal status.
A federal judge on Monday ordered the Biden administration to stop cutting razor wire on fences along the southern border in Texas meant to stop illegal migrant crossings. (Benjamin Lowy for Fox News Digital)
In an 11-page document filed in with the federal court in Del Rio, Moses found that the state of Texas had met the required four-part test needed to be granted a temporary halt to the federal government’s action, but the judge noted one exception.
Federal agents used a forklift to lift Texas’ razor wire fence. (The State of Texas v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
“The Court shall grant the temporary relief requested, with one important exception for any medical emergency that mostly likely results in serious bodily injury or death to a person, absent any boats or other life-saving apparatus available to avoid such medical emergencies prior to reaching the concertina wire barrier,” the judge wrote in the court filing.
The temporary restraining order will remain in place until the parties have an opportunity to present evidence at a preliminary injunction hearing before the court, which is scheduled for Nov. 7.
The Department of Justice, which is handling the litigation, declined to comment.
Brianna Herlihy is a politics writer for Fox News Digital.
Jesus Ramirez, 29, with a Venezuelan flag, crosses into the U.S. from Mexico with hundreds of Venezuelans in Eagle Pass, Texas, early on September 23, 2023. Thousands of migrants arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border September 22, hoping to be allowed into the United States, with U.S. border forces reporting 1.8 million encounters with migrants in the last 12 months. | PAULA RAMON/AFP via Getty Images
A surge of illegal immigrants in a Texas town has led to increased crime and forced the closure of a lucrative international bridge, prompting the town’s Democrat mayor to blame President Joe Biden for the crisis.
During a recent interview with Erin Burnett on CNN’s “OutFront,” Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas described the situation as “very serious” for the city, which has a population ranging from 28,000 to 30,000.
“In the last couple of days, we’ve had an excess of 5,000 people cross from Piedras Negras, Mexico, into Eagle Pass, Texas,” he told the cable news network.
Salinas lamented that people were being “let loose” into the community, raising safety concerns and leading to the closure of their international bridge, a significant source of revenue. “You have all these thousands of people just walking in, without any consequence whatsoever,” he was quoted as saying.
State and federal agencies, including the Department of Public Safety and Border Patrol, are assisting the town. However, Salinas expressed disappointment with the Biden administration’s lack of action. “I’ll be honest with you, I believe 100 percent he does [bear some responsibility],” Salinas said.
The mayor also criticized the federal government for not reaching out to him or his staff. “Nobody has bothered to call me, anyone in the city staff saying, ‘Hey, this is the federal government. We know what you’re going through. We’re worried about you. This is our plan of action,’” he said.
Salinas called for the enforcement of existing laws. “Please, just enforce the laws that are on the books. We are a nation of laws,” he urged, emphasizing that the situation is unfair to those who have immigrated legally in the past.
Salinas concluded by saying that the situation is “unacceptable.”
“It takes a lot of money and years to do it the right way. And it’s not fair for those people that now we have thousands of people coming in without one single consequence,” he said.
Texas and the Biden administration have had considerable differences over immigration policy for the U.S. southern border with Mexico, which has seen a significant increase in illegal migration since Biden took office. In the first 10 months of fiscal year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported nearly 2 million encounters with illegal immigrants at the southwest border.
According to preliminary data from The Washington Post, a record number of migrants crossed the southern border in August. There were reportedly 177,000 arrests along the Mexico border last month, an increase from 132,652 in July and 99,539 in June. U.S. Border Patrol arrested at least 91,000 migrants who entered the country as part of a family group in August.
A DHS spokesperson told the outlet that the increases are part of “seasonal trends,” and the government has repatriated over 17,000 parents and children who crossed the border as families since May.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra of the Western District of Texas, Austin Division, ruled that the state can’t have a floating barrier on the Rio Grande without permission from the federal government, a victory for the Biden administration that the state has vowed to appeal.
Ezra issued a preliminary injunction ordering Texas to remove a 1,000-foot buoy barrier along the Rio Grande.
In July, under the directive of Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas deployed the buoy barrier to curb illegal entry into the U.S. amid an increase in border crossings in recent years. The U.S. Department of Justice argued that the buoys were installed in violation of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act because they were placed without permission from the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
“Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier. Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters,” wrote Ezra, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is sending Texas National Guard troops to the southern border to hold off what he declared in a letter to President Joe Biden to be an “invasion” of illegal migrants.
“I officially declared an invasion at our border because of Biden’s policies,” Abbott said in a post on the social media site X on Wednesday. “We deployed the Texas National Guard, Department of Public Safety, and local law enforcement. We are building a border wall, razor wire, and marine barriers. We are also repelling migrants.”
Abbott also accused federal border agents of cutting state installations of razor wire in Eagle Pass on Wednesday, allowing the illegal migrants access to the U.S. side of the border.
“Texas installed razor wire in Eagle Pass to stop illegal crossings. Today the Biden Admin CUT that wire, opening the floodgates to illegal immigrants,” Abbott wrote in a separate post Wednesday. “I immediately deployed more Texas National Guard to repel illegal crossings and install more razor wire.”
“Your inaction has led to catastrophic consequences,” the letter said. “Under your watch, America is suffering the highest volume of illegal immigration in the history of our country. This past year, more than 2 million immigrants tried to enter the country illegally, coming from more than 100 countries across the globe.”
Abbott said in the letter that due to Biden’s failures, the United Nations named the U.S.-Mexico border the “deadliest land crossing” in the world.
“Texans are paying the price for your failure,” the letter reads. “Ranches are being ripped apart, and homes are vulnerable to intrusion. Our border communities are regularly disrupted by human traffickers and bailouts. Deadly fentanyl is crossing the porous border to such a degree that it is now the leading cause of death for citizens between the ages of 18 and 45.”
Abbott’s move comes after installing razor wire and buoys in the Rio Grande River, which the Biden administration challenged in court as a violation of the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act, the Washington Examiner reported.
Democrat state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who is running against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz for his Senate seat, posted Wednesday that the citizens in the area were “fighting back” against Abbott’s “inhumane” actions.
“The citizens and community of Eagle Pass are fighting back against the inhumane treatment of migrants under Operation Lone Star,” the post read. “Texans want real solutions to address border security and reform our broken immigration system. The days of Cruz’s negligence must come to an end.”
Defying a request from the Department of Justice, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told President Joe Biden on Monday that he will not be ordering the removal of floating barriers from the Rio Grande River.
“To end the risk that migrants will be harmed crossing the border illegally, you must fully enforce the laws of the United States that prohibit illegal immigration between ports of entry,” Abbott wrote in a letter to Biden after the Justice Department requested last week that he remove the barriers. “In the meantime, Texas will fully utilize its constitutional authority to deal with the crisis you have caused.”
“Texas will see you in court, Mr. President,” he added.
On Thursday, the DOJ said it plans to file a lawsuit against Texas for the placement of the floating barriers in the Rio Grande, according to a letter obtained by CNN and sources familiar with the matter who spoke to the outlet. According to the letter sent to Abbott, the Justice Department set a deadline of 2 p.m. ET on Monday for Texas to commit to removing the floating barriers before legal action would be taken.
Addressing Biden, the Republican governor said he had “asserted Texas’ sovereign interest” in protecting the state’s borders with the marine barriers in his “role as the commander-in-chief of our State’s militia under Article IV, § 7 of the Texas Constitution.”
In response, the White House decried Abbott’s actions as “dangerous and unlawful.”
“Gov. Abbott’s dangerous and unlawful actions are undermining that effective plan and making it hard for the men and women of Border Patrol to do their jobs of securing the border,” White House spokesman Abdullah Hasan told CNN. “The governor’s actions are cruel and putting both migrants and border agents in danger.‘
“If Gov. Abbott truly wanted to drive toward real solutions, he’d be asking his Republican colleagues in Congress, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, why they voted against President Biden’s request for record funding for the Department of Homeland Security and why they’re blocking comprehensive immigration reform and border security measures to finally fix our broken immigration system,” he said.
The DOJ’s threat of legal action is based on a clause in the Rivers and Harbors Act that “prohibits the creation of any obstruction to the navigable capacity of waters of the United States, and further prohibits building any structure in such waters without authorization from the United States Army Corps of Engineers.”
Texas is already facing a lawsuit brought by the owner of a Texas canoe and kayaking company. That suit was filed the same day that Texas began deploying buoys for the floating barrier. It lists the state of Texas and Abbott, as well as the Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety, according to CNN.
It’s an age-old question that philosophers, theologians, and average Americans like you and me have tried to answer for centuries. Ponderance about theodicy, the vindication of God’s goodness despite the existence of evil, manifests even more prominently in the wake of tragedies like the recent shooting at an Allen, Texas outlet mall that left eight dead and at least seven others wounded.
For Christians, the deaths of eight legally innocent people are a grave reminder that, as Ephesians 6:12 states, “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Deranged and demonic people doing deranged and demonic acts are something Christians are warned to expect in a world controlled by evil. Moments of apparent hopelessness like this one are soothed by the promise of an eternal end to death, suffering, and mourning. The fact that God himself plans to wipe away our tears brings a certain kind of peace to worried and weary souls.
For the ruling class, however, shootings like this one are terrifying because they are an enigma. In a desperate plea to satiate their endless hopelessness, leftists try to blame life’s trials and tribulations on what they claim to be the biggest problems society has to offer.
Despite the fact that these “threats” are temporary and fall short during any level of scrutiny, leftists continually invoke sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and other labels to interpret adversity.
False Gods
If you do not understand the inherent presence of sin in the world, someone being possessed by an evil so grim that he will maliciously end lives boggles minds and souls. Followers of Christ certainly don’t know all the specifics on why a 33-year-old man decided to gun down unsuspecting families over the weekend. We do, however, have a moral framework that rationalizes seemingly irrational behavior and grants us unwavering hope all at the same time.
The same cannot be said for the political left and their allies in the corporate media who put blind faith in the things of the world to decipher disaster. That’s why, mere hours after the Allen shooting, unnamed sources and eager corporate media outlets rushed to link the Hispanic gunman to “white supremacy.” That point made zero sense from the beginning but media mouthpieces latched onto it like a drug.
Idolizing false religions like race as the lens through which everything must be looked at will never explain why a Hispanic man opened fire in a predominantly white suburb. Understanding that evil has long crept its way into the crevices and cracks of human souls does. Bad things happen to good people because Adam and Eve ushered in an era of turmoil. Every man, woman, and child who is born and lives in a broken world is afflicted by a spiritual war. If they aren’t fighting against evil forces, they are overcome by them. Unfortunately, as evidenced by the revolting reactions offered by the left following the Nashville shooting at the Covenant School, the left’s scrambling to manipulate tragedies to blame their favorite political targets invites further evil to replace compassion.
Thoughts and Prayers
Leftism is a false religion that hampers not only a person’s ability to understand human suffering but also the remedy for our sorrows. Their visceral reaction to “thoughts and prayers” evidences this. Every time tragedy strikes, social media pages are flooded with comments from the faithful promising to pray for the bodies, minds, and souls of those affected. Unfortunately, this sincere gesture is frequently met with angry squawking that “thoughts and prayers” are excuses for inaction that mean nothing. For people who understand that evil exists and calamity is inevitable, however, “thoughts and prayers” mean everything. To reject the divine power of prayer is to sentence one’s soul and mind to the fear and anxieties about death that plague the sinful human condition.
We live in a broken world populated by broken people in need of a savior. No one can even begin to wrestle with the concept of the death of innocents until they understand that basic principle. There is but one remedy for evil and its name isn’t anti-racism or gun control. It’s Jesus.
The burden of saving the world was lifted from our shoulders more than 2,000 years ago. That doesn’t mean we should opt for complacency in times of crisis but it also doesn’t mean we must rush to disarm ourselves of our best spiritual and physical defenses, as so many try to do after tragedy.
There is redemption and there is hope for those who want it. Let us pray that those weary, searching souls discover there is no fear in death if you live a life with Christ.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Parents in a Texas school district are demanding answers from school officials after first-graders allegedly forced their 6-year-old classmate to perform a sex act while they filmed it despite a teacher being in the classroom.
Parents and community members angered by the situation at Plainview South Elementary School in Plainview gathered outside the administrative office of the Plainview Independent School District (ISD) on Monday, according to the Plainview Herald, which noted the protest swelled to as many as 30 people throughout the day.
Family members of the girl involved are planning another protest at 6 p.m. Friday at local Broadway Park, local NBC affiliate KCBD reported.
“A 6-year-old was exposed to things that even adults would have a hard time overcoming,” a protesting parent of another student at the elementary school told the Herald. “This is trauma at its worst, and it is a trickle-down effect because it affects everyone around them.”
Parents and community members angered by the situation at Plainview South Elementary School in in Plainview, Texas, are demanding answers from school officials. (Google Maps)
Parents who were protesting Monday reportedly learned about the alleged April 19 incident after the school district called the parent of the first-grade girl. After receiving the call from the district, the child reportedly told her family that another student had pressured her to perform a sex act.
Heather Gonzales, an older cousin of the 6-year-old girl, told KCBD that the girl’s family noticed a sudden change in her behavior amid indications of distress and complaints of a stomach ache.
The girl reportedly revealed that a boy had exposed himself to her in the school lunch line and that she had also been pulled under a desk and pressured to perform a sex act while another student recorded with a district-issued iPad.
“She said she was hitting him with the poetry book,” said Gonzales, noting that the video showed her cousin did her best to fight back. The girl reportedly claimed the incident did not stop “until they let me go.”
Students play outside Plainview South Elementary School in Plainview, Texas. (Plainview South Elementary School/Facebook)
Gonzales claimed the school district has not provided adequate answers.
“Everything was ‘no comment, I cannot tell you, no comment,’” Gonzales said. “So, you mean to tell me abuse has been happening for a week and a half and these kids are still at the same desk? My cousin is still at a desk with all boys, having to see her abusers every day?”
The students have reportedly since been moved to separate classrooms.
Plainview ISD Superintendent H.T. Sanchez told KCBD that the school made a report and contacted Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) when school officials discovered video of the incident a day after it happened. He said a state investigator came to Plainview the next week and has been working with local law enforcement.
“He had asked that we hold confidentiality because he wanted to be sure that he was able to get the full story from each of the students, the minors, that were involved,” Sanchez said. “All of the steps that we’re required to take, we took.”
The district also released an extensive statement explaining that because minors are involved, “the school system must be very careful in the information it provides,” according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
The statement assured that Sanchez, assistant superintendent Yesinia Pardo and South Elementary principal Jennifer Hughey “have visited with the parents/guardians of families involved in a recent incident at South Elementary that is under Child Protective Services and law enforcement investigation.”
The statement also noted that the alleged incident “occurred away from the full vision of the teacher” while she was working with other students.
When the teacher collected the students’ iPads the next day, she noticed one of them had been locked with a password and took the device to the campus administrator. “Inappropriate content was discovered” on the iPad after a tech from the technology department unlocked it, according to the district.
The teacher involved has since been placed on administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation, the district said.
“My daughter comes home with bruises and rashes if she doesn’t participate in these little boys’ sick games.”— Plainview South Elementary School parent
Parents who spoke to the Herald during the Monday protest outside the school district’s administrative office claimed the incident with the 6-year-old is not an isolated one.
“There have been multiple moms coming out about stuff that has been happening all year and nothing is being done about it,” one parent said. “It’s hit its peak and that’s why we’re here today, to get answers.”
“My daughter comes home with bruises and rashes if she doesn’t participate in these little boys’ sick games,” another parent at the protest said. “They will punch her, give her Indian burns, they’ll call her names and cuss at her.”
Other parents at Plainview South Elementary claimed the alleged incident with the 6-year-old girl is not an isolated one. (iStock)
“You can’t have your kids in a classroom like that,” one parent said. “You’re worried about the education they are receiving and what they are being exposed to. A lot of parents have parental controls on what their kid is able to watch and see at this age, and we do all of that just for them to go to school and be exposed to stuff they should’ve never seen.”
A spokesperson for Plainview ISD told Fox News Digital that “CPS is continuing its investigation, and we continue to cooperate with CPS and law enforcement, by their request we are not able to comment any further than we have shared.”
Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to jon.brown@fox.com.
I recently wrote about the current wave of rainbow-flavored “insurrections” sweeping through America’s red statehouses. I called them part of a color revolution. Color revolutions, you will recall, are traditionally “popular uprisings against authoritarian regimes, such as those that took place in former Soviet countries such as Ukraine and Georgia in the early and mid-2000s.”
In our American color revolution, the script has flipped. Here, red states are the only rebels standing strong in the face of increasingly authoritarian central power — wrapped, of course, in the rainbow flag.
Tennessee recently made a star out of State Rep. Justin Pearson, the code-switching preacher man with the afro who just a few years ago was a repp tie-wearing prep at Colgate, but this year led an invasion of screaming gun-control protesters into the Tennessee Capitol, shut it down, and got himself expelled (temporarily, of course. Plot twist: The lead characters on this show always win in the end!)
We’ve now seen color revolutionaries take to state capitols in Tennessee, Montana, Kansas, Kentucky, Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri. This week, the color revolution came to Texas. The radicals are on top. And (if you will excuse my French), thanks to their total effete ineffectuality, red states are getting bottomed, hard.
The Best Little Statehouse in Texas
Showrunners set this week’s episode of “Transurrection” in Texas. Why? They can’t turn Texas blue, right? …Right?
Twitter soon filled up with clips of the state Capitol in Austin getting overrun by a shrieking mob of LGBT cuckoos waving transgender flags and shutting down voting on an important bill. They’ve been keeping Austin weird for years, biding their time, and it finally paid off.
A Texas Republican state delegate on the scene tweeted a video of the mob and reported, “Trans activists are losing their minds, shoving signs into [a Texas conservative’s] face, and allowing spit to spew from their mouths while they scream ‘no place for hate.’” You have to admire their shamelessness, frankly. “No place for hate!” they scream, as they bludgeon their enemies.
The “hate” bill in question, naturally, would ban genital mutilation of children statewide. As we know by now, the idea of not being permitted to permanently sterilize and castrate kids makes sterilized and castrated adults very, very mad. How dare you not let us ritually initiate your son into our family-friendly extreme body modification cult!
A local newspaper reported on the action: “More than one hundred protesters rallied at the Capitol in opposition to the bill Tuesday in anticipation of the floor debate, engaging in chants including, “Protect Trans Kids!” and holding signs reading, “Let Trans Kids Grow Up.”
Am I the only one who notices the irony here? They want to “let trans kids grow up” — by putting them on irreversible puberty blockers that literally stop them from growing up. Logic — like charm, charisma, and good looks — is not this group’s strong suit.
But, as always, their ugly tactics work. “As protesters were removed from the House gallery, Democrats in the House on Tuesday successfully delayed debate on Senate Bill 14, which would ban certain gender-affirming medical treatments for transgender minors. Using a procedural tactic … the bill was sent back to the House Committee on Public Health, then voted out of the committee again Tuesday evening,” the paper reported, emphasis mine.
They may still lose in the end, but they survived the day.
I feel like I’m watching a new streaming docudrama show on Netflix: “Game of Throngs.” “The Transmandalorian.” “Sex Reassignment in the City.”
Last week’s episode was set in Montana and guest-starred an unknown man in a dress, an impish scamp named Zooey Zephyr. Zooey is not your typical social media starlet; he’s got a strong jawline, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a deep voice. His script, however, follows the Tennessee storyline virtually line for line. Zooey led his “transurrection” over a new Montana bill that would outlaw transgender interventions for children. Just like in Tennessee, he broke the rules, caused a riot, got ejected, and then used the ejection as a battering ram to take down the Republican leadership. Here’s how Fox reported it:
‘The only thing I will say is if you vote yes on this bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,’ Zephyr said when debating SB99. Critics demanded an apology. However, after refusing to do so, Republicans led the chamber in a 68-32 vote last week to bar Zephyr from accessing the House floor. Zephyr cannot enter the anteroom or gallery but can vote remotely. (Emphasis mine)
Even when they lose they win!
How many times can they run this same storyline? Answer: At least 50 times, one for each state that requires it.
I seem to remember some other event a few years back, when protesters holding flags entered a capitol to stop lawmakers from voting on something. If I recall correctly, a lot of them were sentenced to years in prison for daring to block a vote. I will pray none of the nonbinary furries in the Texas Capitol suffer the same fate! They don’t look like they could last five seconds away from their cats.
The foundation of modern American democracy is that all Americans deserve some kind of representation in the rooms where law and policy are made. Not content to control those rooms in states where they dominate the political scene, some Republicans have said, in essence, that representation is a privilege for communities whose chosen lawmakers don’t offend their sensibilities. (Emphasis mine)
I like to picture flustered Republicans hitting the smelling salts and the fainting couch, like Scarlett’s Aunt Pittypat, when the winsome Zoey Zephyr and his merry band of rebels made a bit of noise during working hours.
Hilariously, the title of Bouie’s column is “A Sinister New Page in the Republican Playbook.” Maybe I shouldn’t say this out loud, but: The Republicans don’t have a playbook.
I wish they had a sinister playbook! How can we get them a sinister playbook and teach them how to use it? Because they absolutely do not know what to do in the face of mob rule. They are off balance. Unprepared. And it will only get worse.
One of these was an almost-10-year-old Cassandra Robinson, who in the photos looks like a muscular little boy with long hair dyed green, and wore “a T-shirt that read: ‘inspired by the STRONG WOMEN in my life.’” There is no 10-year-old on Earth who would dream up a sentence like that and want it on a T-shirt. Is his name a cry for help?
End Game
So, what’s the end goal? This is not just about gun control, or the “right” to castrate 8-year-olds.
Here’s what I think it’s obviously about: performing a radical mutilation surgery on the Constitution. Neutering it, for good — irreversibly even. This is the ultimate prize. Of course, it’s incredibly hard to change the Constitution, with good reason. That’s why it’s rarely been done in our history.
There are a few ways to rewrite the Constitution, but all the paths go through the states. You need three-fourths of states to ratify a new amendment. Insurmountable? Democrats already have 20 to 22 blue and purple states. They need 37, and that means the South is the juiciest prize, especially with its rapidly changing demographics.
Even in red states like Tennessee, they’d only need to flip 10 percent of the voters to win the state house. Age and heart disease will take care of the boomer-aged bitter clingers. College indoctrination will take care of the rest. Every four years a new crop of teenage voters arrives ready to make their “voices heard.” Time is on their side, not ours. And they’ve got all the time in the world.
Well, color me reacquainted! “Our Constitution is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. … But the remoteness of the possibility of formal constitutional change today may be as much a product of constitutional culture as constitutional structure: Several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change.” (Emphasis mine)
Got that? The color revolutionaries are developing new muscle memory they will get to flex again and again as they continue dominating us in their weight class. Meanwhile, hordes of radicals are greedily gnawing through the country’s aging superstructure.
The Color of Money
The “tranissaries” of the revolution are obviously well-funded and blessed with a loyal army of loudmouth fanatics willing to win by any means necessary.
Are you?
I don’t know exactly who is directing and funding the revolutionaries. But it’s clear the country’s largest foundations and NGOs have these unsuspecting states in their sights. They have arrayed the full might of their billions squarely at “voting rights” and “defending democracy.” In other words, they are the architects behind activist mobs and the skilled ballot harvesters that have so far netted them win after win — including the White House.
The Macarthur Foundation and Ford Foundation, which funds dozens of grassroots activist groups including something called the “Texas Civil Rights Project,” are on the case with their billions. The Carnegie Foundation is doing its part for the cause, too. And there are many others. These massive bloodless megaliths are cleverly wrapping themselves in the cozy civil rights issue of the day — poor little trans kids (or election overhauls favored by candidates who love that issue) — and winning enormous popular support.
The wealth of America’s greatest old families is being used to systematically strip the place bare, and they’re looting it of everything that’s not nailed down. Including any stray toddlers. Viva la rainbow revoluçion!
It’s time to build a counterrevolution, fast.
Peachy Keenan is a contributing editor and regular essayist for The American Mind, a publication of The Claremont Institute. She is the author of “Domestic Extremist: A Practical Guide to Winning the Culture War” (coming June 6th from Regnery). She also writes at peachykeenan.substack.com , and you can always find her on Twitter @keenanpeachy, at least until she is canceled.
Colorado Democrat Gov. Jared Polis signed a new law last week to circumvent red-state bans on abortion and transgender treatments.
While Republican lawmakers ramp up protections for vulnerable teens caught in America’s contemporary transgender craze, Polis aims to make Colorado a destination for impressionable minors to seek permanent procedures from puberty blockers to surgery.
“Here in Colorado, we value individual freedoms, and we stand up to protect them,” Polis said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “I’m excited by the work of advocates and legislators to further Colorado’s reputation as a beacon of freedom, a beacon of choice, a beacon of individuality where we live on our own terms.”
Senate Bill 23-188, signed into law Friday, opens the door for “trans tourism” in the state, allowing minors to seek abortions or “gender-affirming health care services.” In other words, teens seduced by transgender ideology in Kansas, where lawmakers are preparing to ban interventions for minors, may travel to Colorado for sterilizing procedures under Polis’s protection with parental consent. Similar legislation is under consideration in Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed a bill to bar underage transgender surgeries earlier this year but included provisions in the legislation to make the new law toothless.
The Colorado Senate bill signed last week, titled “Protections For Accessing Reproductive Health Care,” also allows minors to abort pregnancies without parental consent.
The new law protects people seeking abortions and transgender interventions who travel to Colorado by prohibiting state or local agencies from penalizing complicit medical providers. The legislation also nullifies extradition requests in other states where such procedures are banned and refuses to recognize out-of-state criminal or civil proceedings relating to these procedures. Previously, Colorado already established itself as a go-to destination for women seeking abortions from Texas and Oklahoma, where it is banned.
While policymakers in other blue states already passed laws to establish their states as abortion “safe havens,” Colorado’s protections for transgender minors seeking life-altering surgeries is a first-of-its-kind. The new law comes as transgender surgeries are expected to become a $5 billion-dollar industry by the end of the decade, according to a report last year from Grand View Research.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
If Americans want to understand how genuine “voter suppression” works, they should take a look at the widespread disenfranchisement of voters in Harris County, Texas, during the 2022 midterms.
On Election Day, county election officials’ misadministration of the contest led to ballot paper shortages, delayed openings and temporary closures of voting centers, and an untold number of disenfranchised voters.
“I have never seen anything so egregiously, grossly mismanaged as the elections in Harris County this past year,” said Harris County GOP Chair Cindy Siegel during a recent Texas Senate committee hearing.
For context, Harris County is the third-most populous county in America. While historically favorable to Republicans, county residents have increasingly voted for Democrats in recent election cycles. During the 2020 election, for instance, Joe Biden won the county by 13 points, with Democrats also expanding their majority on the county’s governing commissioners court last fall.
Not long after the polls opened on Election Day, local media outlets began reporting that several Harris County voting centers were experiencing ballot paper shortages, delayed openings, and problems with voting machines.
What Happened in Harris County?
Nearly two months after the election, Harris County released an “inconclusive” assessment detailing the reported problems election workers and voters encountered on Election Day. In addition to ballot paper shortages, the report confirmed that some voting centers “did not open on time,” with reasons ranging from staffing problems to election officials not receiving the keys to their center’s voting equipment prior to polls opening.
The report further revealed that during the early part of Election Day, the county’s ePollbook server “lost replication,” which “prevented the wait time tool from updating the website, prevented the supply team from seeing real-time check in and disabled the sample ballot look up feature.” Such circumstances “had a direct impact on the ability [of county election officials] to see how many voters were being checked-in and what the wait times were” at any voting center.
While the assessment says that 68 precinct election judges “reported running out of their initial allotment” of paper ballots, an investigation conducted by local news outlet KHOU 11 indicates the problem was more widespread. According to the investigation, 121 of the county’s 782 voting centers “did not initially receive enough ballot paper to cover voter turnout.”
“The county allotted each of the locations six ballot paper packets, or enough for 600 ballots. But the total votes cast exceeded that amount, sometimes by hundreds of ballots,” the KHOU 11 report reads.
At the committee hearing, Siegel testified that one of the Harris County GOP’s precinct chairs developed a “heat map” purportedly showing that “the majority” of the 121 polls were in “Republican voting areas.”
The KHOU 11 investigation also found that on Election Day, 52 voting centers “received less paper in 2022 than ballots cast in 2018.” Harris County has not disclosed why voting centers ran out of ballot paper. It also remains unknown how many voters were disenfranchised as a result of such issues.
Investigations and Continued Cover-Up
Following the Nov. 8 contest, leading Texas Republicans began demanding answers from Harris County officials over the locality’s Election Day problems. On Nov. 14, GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a statement calling on the secretary of state, attorney general’s office, and Texas Rangers to “initiate investigations into allegations of improprieties in the way that the 2022 elections were conducted in Harris County,” adding that voters “deserve to know what happened.”
Not long after, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced her office had launched an investigation into the county’s Election Day problems following a request from the Texas secretary of state’s office to help with an inquiry into “possible criminal activity relating to shortages of paper ballots.” After receiving backlash from Texas Democrats, a bureau chief in Ogg’s office defended the investigation, saying Ogg was following state law.
Despite the seriousness of the matter, leading Harris County officials have attempted to stonewall efforts to uncover what led to the administrative failures on Election Day. When pressed by Harris County’s commissioners in January about the ballot paper shortages, Clifford Tatum, Harris County’s election administrator, refused to provide any details, using a lawsuit filed against his office by the Harris County GOP as justification for remaining mum.
County officials have displayed similar evasiveness with local media. Last year, KHOU 11 and a local ABC affiliate filed open records requests with Harris County over records related to the Nov. 8 election. After the Texas attorney general denied a request from Harris County to dismiss the requests last month, the locality filed a lawsuit against the AG’s office last week to keep the records hidden.
Texas Republicans Offer Solutions
In response to Harris County’s extensivetrack record of failed election administration, Texas Republicans have introduced numerous bills this year seeking to enhance the integrity of the state’s elections. If passed and signed into law, SB 1911 would allow any county official responsible for acquiring election supplies who “intentionally fails to provide an election precinct with the required number of ballots” to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor. Said officials could also be charged under the same statute for failing to “promptly supplement the distributed ballots upon request by a polling place.”
Individuals convicted of a Class A misdemeanor are subject to a fine of up to $4,000, a maximum of one year in jail, or both.
Also introduced is SB 1039, which mandates local election officials address inquiries related to election irregularities and provide “explanation[s] and “supporting documentation” when such information is requested by local and state party chairs, candidates, or election judges.
“This is about a catastrophic lack of performance in Harris County,” said bill sponsor and Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt during last month’s State Affairs Committee hearing. “It’s too big to ignore. The state can’t afford this type of problem in Harris County and neither can the residents.”
Additional election integrity bills introduced by Texas Republicans would make illegal voting a felony, withdraw Texas from the leftist-controlled voter-roll management system known as ERIC, and grant the secretary of state the power to suspend and replace an election administrator, among other reforms.
The kinds of Election Day failures displayed in Harris County are notably problematic because of the partisan difference in how Americans vote. While Democrats have made unsupervised, mail-in voting a key facet of their electoral strategy, Republicans prefer in-person voting on Election Day.
If this trend grows, it means that any election misadministration on Election Day will continue to disproportionately harm GOP voters over Democrats. Such circumstances would only further contribute to Americans’ waning confidence in U.S. elections, making accountability for what happened in Harris County all the more necessary.
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Donald Trump.
Republican lawmakers in Texas are pushing legislation that would make it a state felony to cross the border from Mexico illegally and establish a state unit of officers to assist with the arrests of migrants entering the state at places other than ports of entry.
Introduced by Texas GOP state Rep. Matt Schaefer, House Bill 20 would create a “Border Protection Unit” that allows its officers to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border illegally including with the use of non-deadly force.”
Schaefer’s bill, which will have to pass both of Texas’ Republican-controlled legislative chambers before the end of May, notes that officers serving in the unit must be U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents, and have law enforcement experience.
The state House proposal would also give officers serving in the unit immunity “from criminal and civil liability for any actions taken that are authorized” under the proposed law. In addition, civilians who have not been convicted of a felony could also be invited by the unit’s chief, which will be appointed by the governor, “to participate in unit operations and functions, but such persons may not have arresting authority unless trained and specifically authorized by the governor.”
National Guard agents place a barbed wire wall on the banks of the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, on the border with Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico, on March 8, 2023. (HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)
People arrested for crossing into Texas illegally would face up to 10 years in prison and up to $10,000 in fines for each violation.
Another bill introduced in the state Senate by GOP state Sen. Brian Birdwell, would make it a state crime for people who forgo legal immigration proceedings and cross into Texas illegally.
Birdwell’s legislation, which has received support from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, would “jail a person for a year or two years if the person tried to enter the country a second time” and “also punish the person to life in prison if they had been previously convicted of a felony,” according to the Texas Tribune.
The offices of Schaefer and Birdwell did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the proposed legislation, all of which is seen as a direct test to federal immigration law.
Under current federal law, individuals who are arrested for entering the country illegally could face a misdemeanor charge. Those arrested a second time under current law, could then be charged with a felony and banned from entering the country for a number of years.
Texas GOP House Speaker Dade Phelan said in a statement that “addressing our state’s border and humanitarian crisis” was a priority for lawmakers in the state and that the proposed border police — as well as a proposed Legislative Border Safety Oversight Committee, which would provide border safety policy recommendations and oversight to the new policing unit and work on issues in South Texas — was a “must-pass issue.”
The Republican proposals in the state legislature serve as an extended effort to advance Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to wrangle illegal border crossings known as Operation Lone Star.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference on Jan. 31, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
The $4 billion border initiative from the governor has included an increase in patrols near the border with Mexico, gridlocking traffic with increased commercial truck inspections, and building more barriers along the international boundary. The effort also included directing officers to detain migrants who trespass on private property and bused thousands of migrants to Democrat-led cities, including New York and Washington, D.C.
Civil rights organizations and Texas Democrats were quick to denounce the legislation in the state.
“It is designed to create racial profiling,” Texas Democratic Party Chairman Gilberto Hinojosa told The Associated Press. “Something that is just horrendous.”
“I think the underlying fact that it is going to allow people to question our being American in our border communities and across Texas is unacceptable,” Texas state Rep. Victoria Neave Criado, chairwoman of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said, according to The Associated Press.
Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital when asked about the proposals in the state.
Since taking office in January 2021, President Biden has watched as illegal border crossings have surged. Many migrants who have turned themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol agents and were released into the U.S. interior as they await federal immigration court proceedings.
Migrants illegally cross into the United States via a hole in a fence in El Paso, Texas, on Dec. 22, 2022. (ALLISON DINNER/AFP via Getty Images)
There were over 1.7 million encounters of migrants at the border in FY 21 and more than 2.3 million in FY 22. So far in FY 2023, which began in October, there have been more than a million encounters.
The House Homeland Security Committee announced last month that it would hold its first field hearing on the crisis at the southern border on March 15, giving Republicans a chance to highlight what they say is the direct link between the chaos and disorder at the border and the Biden administration’s policies.
Democrats on the committee, however, are reportedly bailing from attending the hearing that would provide lawmakers with a first-hand look at the communities affected by the influx of migrants.
Fox News’ Adam Shaw, Greg Wehner, and The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Four Americans who went missing in Mexico last week were taken in a possible kidnapping, according to the FBI. The agency is seeking public help in locating the four Americans who disappeared on March 3 after they crossed the border from Brownsville, Texas.
“Four Americans crossed into Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico driving a white minivan with North Carolina license plates,” read a statement from the FBI published by Fox News. “Shortly after crossing into Mexico, unidentified gunmen fired upon the passengers in the vehicle. All four Americans were placed in a vehicle and taken from the scene by armed men.” The FBI did not name the four missing individuals.
The Americans “had traveled to the border city of Matamoros for medical procedures,” a U.S. official “citing receipts found in the vehicle” told CNN. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador “offered a similar explanation.”
“The information we have is that they crossed the border to buy medicines in Mexico, there was a confrontation between groups and they were detained,” Obrador said, according to CNN. “The whole government is working on it.”
The region across the border from Brownsville is predominantly run by the Gulf drug cartel, a criminal syndicate and drug trafficking organization in constant conflict with warring factions.
Ken Salazar, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, said Monday American officials are working with Mexican law enforcement to bring the four missing citizens home. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for the safe return of the missing Americans and the arrest of the captors. Tips can be submitted to https://tips.fbi.gov.
Kidnapping of Americans in Mexico is far from unprecedented. The State Department has warned Americans against trips to the Tamaulipas state since at least Oct. 22 with a level 4 travel advisory “due to crime and kidnapping.”
Last year, an American tourist had his foot hacked by a machete after being kidnapped by his taxi driver. In December 2021, six Mexican nationals from a trafficking group in Tijuana were indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury for kidnapping nine victims and murdering six. Three of those reportedly executed were American citizens. In 2013, an American named Shane Andersen was held for $20,000 ransom in Monterrey, Mexico.
Most kidnappings don’t pick up major press coverage. This week’s hostage situation, however, has already driven headlines across the major networks as the U.S. southern border with Mexico continues to spiral out of control.
CBS aired apparent footage of the kidnapping Monday morning.
Escalating violence across the international boundary has amplified pressure on Washington lawmakers to address the crisis.
In February, newly-elected Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made his first visit to the border as the leading figure in the lower chamber. McCarthy blasted the Biden administration’s lethargic response to the crisis at the border where a lack of law enforcement has opened the door to unchecked migration and a flood of narcotics pouring into American communities.
“We don’t even have operational control of it anymore,” McCarthy said at a section of the border wall in southeast Arizona.
The Republican House speaker threatened to launch an impeachment inquiry into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the agency’s failure to secure the nation’s boundaries.
“You cannot tell us this border’s secure when now there is enough fentanyl in this country to kill every single American more than 20 times over,” McCarthy said.
In January, cartel violence reached the doorstep of McCarthy’s own California House district where six, including a baby, were murdered in a “cartel-style execution.”
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
Democrats are working overtime to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next candidate will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A state court judge refused to halt the Texas Bar’s assault on Attorney General Ken Paxton for his decision to challenge several swing states’ execution of the 2020 election in Texas v. Pennsylvania, a little-noticed perfunctory order published in late January revealed.
While the partisan targeting of Paxton represents but one of the many attempts by Democrats to weaponize state bars to dissuade attorneys from representing Republicans, court documents obtained by The Federalist reveal that in the case of the Texas attorney general, the bar went nuclear.
In March of 2022, as Paxton prepared to face Land Commissioner George P. Bush in the May 2022 GOP runoff for attorney general, news leaked that the State Bar of Texas intended to advance an ethics complaint against the Republican attorney general. Then, soon after Paxton prevailed in the primary, on May 25, 2022, the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, which is a standing committee of the State Bar of Texas, filed a disciplinary complaint against Paxton in the Collin County, Texas district court.
While the Texas Bar’s disciplinary complaint represents an outrageous and unconstitutional attack on the attorney general, as will be detailed shortly, the backstory is nearly as troubling — both the machinations underlying the charge against Paxton and, more broadly, the barrage of politicized bar complaints pursued against Republican lawyers who provided legal advice or litigated various issues in the aftermath of the November 2020 general election.
Bars Gone Rogue
The D.C. Bar’s investigation into former Trump administration Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark based on a complaint from Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., exemplifies the partisan co-opting of the various professional responsibility boards charged with overseeing attorneys’ conduct.
In Clark’s case, the ethics charge was both “demonstrably false and premised on the fraudulent narratives pushed by the partisan politicians running the Jan. 6 show trial and their partners in the press.” Yet Clark has been forced to fight for his livelihood because the D.C. Bar allowed Democrats to convert a disagreement over Clark’s legal opinion into a question of professional ethics. Clark has attempted to put a halt to the proceedings by moving to remove the case to the federal district court, but Clark’s motion has been stalled there for several months.
More recently, the California State Bar joined in the political witch hunt when it filed a 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint against attorney and former law professor John Eastman. The California State Bar’s complaint alleged Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” As I wrote at the time:
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible for any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
Eastman’s long and costly battle against the California Bar is only beginning. And that is precisely the point of involving state bars: to make it so painful for attorneys to represent Republicans in election cases that the next presidential candidate — or senatorial or congressional candidate — will be unable to find lawyers willing to battle on their behalf.
A Broader Campaign
These efforts are well-coordinated and well-funded, with the group 65 Project launching in March of 2022 ethics complaints against 10 lawyers who worked on election lawsuits following the 2020 presidential election. According to Influence Watch, “65 Project was ‘devised’ by Democratic consultant and former Clinton administration official Melissa Moss,” and is managed by attorney Michael Teter, a former litigation associate with the DNC-connected law firm Perkins Coie. David Brock, of Media Matters fame, advises the group, and the advisory board includes, among others, the former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D.
The 65 Project reportedly “seeks to disbar 111 lawyers from 26 states in total,” but is “not targeting any Democratic-aligned attorneys who have challenged election laws or results in the past.” Rather, the project’s sole aim is Republican lawyers, such as Eastman, with the group pushing for Eastman’s disbarment from the Supreme Court Bar.
It is not merely private attorneys the Democrat project targets, however. In September, the 65 Project filed complaints against the attorneys general of 15 states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia, advocating the bars in those states take disciplinary action against the attorneys general for conduct related to the 2020 election.
Texas AG Paxton didn’t make the list, though, because local Democrats had already taken up the charge. And here, the backstory reveals the troubling politicization of state bars is not limited to Democratic-connected groups like the 65 Project or to the bars in leftist locales such as D.C. and California.
Anti-Paxton Crusade
In Paxton’s case, the state bar received at least 85 complaints about Paxton related to Texas v. Pennsylvania. The Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel reviewed the complaints and dismissed them, finding “the information alleged did not demonstrate Professional Misconduct.” But then four attorneys appealed the dismissal, including one who, according to court filings, was the president of the Galveston Island Democrats and a friend of a Democrat seeking to run against Paxton for attorney general in the then-upcoming 2022 election.
An appeals body within the Texas State Board reversed the dismissal of the complaints, and later a fifth complaint was added to the charges against Paxton. Paxton was then forced to respond to the allegations, which itself proved difficult because they consisted of vague rhetoric, such as claims that Paxton “violated his duty and obligations as a Texas attorney” and “filed an utterly frivolous lawsuit,” bringing “shame and disrespect to the State of Texas and the legal community of Texas.”
Nonetheless, Paxton filed a detailed response, expanded on the theories Texas asserted in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and provided the bar with an extensive discussion of the factual and legal basis underpinning the court filings. The Texas Bar then handed the complaints over to what Paxton described as “an investigatory panel comprised of six unelected lawyers and activists from Travis County.”
As Paxton’s later court filings would stress, “as a group, the panel donated thousands of dollars to federal, state, and local candidates and causes opposed to Attorney General Paxton.” “What’s more,” Paxton argued in opposing the bar’s case against him, “members of the panel voted consistently in Democratic primaries for over a decade. Several have maintained highly partisan social media accounts hostile to Paxton.”
Unsurprisingly, the partisan panel found “just cause” existed to believe that Paxton had violated a catch-all provision of the Rules of Professional Conduct, namely the canon prohibiting attorneys from engaging “in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.”
But in making this finding and filing a disciplinary petition in the state court, the Texas Bar wholely ignored the fundamental flaw in its crusade against Paxton — and one of constitutional dimension: The state bar, as a bureaucratic arm of the judicial branch, violates the Texas Constitution’s guarantee of separation of powers by challenging Paxton’s execution of his duties as attorney general.
Separation of Powers
Paxton concisely exposed this reality in his briefing, first quoting Texas precedent that teaches: “The Texas Separation of Powers provision is violated … when one branch unduly interferes with another branch so that the other branch cannot effectively exercise its constitutionally assigned powers.” “The Commission’s suit against the Attorney General violates the Separation-of-Powers doctrine,” Paxton continued, because the “decision to file Texas v. Pennsylvania is committed entirely to the Attorney General’s discretion. No quasi-judicial body like the Commission can police the decisions of a duly elected, statewide constitutional officer of the executive branch.”
In seeking the dismissal of the state bar complaint against him based on separation-of-powers principles, Paxton’s argument shows the politicization process becomes nuclear when the target is the state’s attorney general, writing: “Unelected administrarors from the judicial branch attempting to stand in judgment of the elected attorney general who is the sole executive officers with the authority to represent the State of Texas in the Supreme Court of the United States.”
While it is bad enough that the state bar has been used as a sword to attack political enemies, such as Eastman in California and Clark in D.C., to deter attorneys in the future from representing unpopular cases or parties, the weaponization of the state bar against a state’s attorney general is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. As Paxton wrote:
No other attorney in Texas, no one else on the planet can bring a lawsuit on behalf of the State … but we’ve got an administrative arm of the judicial branch, unelected state bureaucrats telling the chief legal officer of the State of Texas how he can exercise his sole prerogative and his exclusive authority to bring a civil lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas.
Yet unelected bureaucrats — many of whom are political enemies of Paxton — have put the attorney general literally on trial for exercising the executive function with which he was constitutionally charged. And while Paxton fully briefed his position — that as a matter of constitutional law and the doctrine of separation of powers, the court lacked jurisdiction to proceed on the bar’s complaint against him — the trial judge summarily rejected Paxton’s motion, merely stating the motion was “denied.”
Paxton has yet to state publicly whether he plans to appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss to the Texas Court of Appeals. But as a matter of principle he should; this case represents not merely an attack on him personally, but on the position of attorney general.
The Federalist obtained copies of the relevant court filings and they are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and the attorneys general from 17 additional states should all be disbarred, according to the reasoning of the disciplinary complaint the State Bar of California filed Thursday against former Trump campaign attorney John Eastman. That detail is one of many buried in the 35-page, 11-count disciplinary complaint made public yesterday in the latest lawfare attack on attorneys who deigned to represent Donald Trump.
State Bar of California’s Chief Trial Counsel George Cardona announced on Thursday the filing of disciplinary charges against Eastman, allegedly arising from Eastman’s engagement “in a course of conduct to plan, promote, and assist then-President Trump in executing a strategy, unsupported by facts or law, to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by obstructing the count of electoral votes of certain states.” The press release announcing the disciplinary charges further claimed that Eastman “made false and misleading statements regarding purported election fraud,” that provoked a crowd into assaulting and breaching the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The 11 charges against Eastman prove troubling throughout, with the State Bar of California proposing to discipline Eastman for presenting legal analyses to his client, Trump, and for speaking publicly on his views about the election, with the bar even attempting to hold Eastman responsible any violence that occurred on Jan. 6. The disciplinary complaint also misrepresents numerous arguments Eastman and others made concerning the 2020 election, falsely equating claims of violations of election law with fraud.
But it is count two of the disciplinary complaint, charging Eastman with “seeking to mislead a court,” that exposes the California State Bar as a kangaroo court.
“On or about December 7, 2020, the State of Texas filed a Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint in the United States Supreme Court, initiating the lawsuit Texas v. Pennsylvania,” begins count two of the complaint against Eastman. The complaint then explains that in that lawsuit, Texas argued the defendant states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin “usurp[ed] their legislatures’ authority and unconstitutionally revised their States’ election statutes.” As a remedy, Texas sought an order from the Supreme Court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the Defendant States’ legislatures and remand to the Defendant States’ respective legislatures to appoint Presidential Electors in a manner consistent with the Electors Clause.”
Eastman, on behalf of then-President Trump, sought to intervene in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case, and in that motion, Eastman “expressly adopted the allegations contained in the Motion for Leave to File Bill of Complaint filed by Texas.” In adopting the allegations Texas made, Eastman, according to the California State Bar, “misl[ed] the Supreme Court by an artifice or false statement of fact or law,” in violation of California’s “Business and Professions Code” that governs attorneys’ conduct in the Golden State.
Under the California State Bar’s reasoning, then, Texas’ attorney general who filed the motion likewise “misled” the U.S. Supreme Court, as did the attorneys general of the 17 other states that supported Texas’ motion for leave to file a bill of complaint. So too would have Sen. Ted Cruz, had the Supreme Court agreed to hear the motion, as he had agreed to argue the case on Trump’s behalf in that circumstance.
While count two represents but one of the 11 distinct charges levied against Eastman, it most clearly exposes the logical conclusion reached when state bars use disciplinary proceedings to conduct lawfare against political opponents.
To date, the bars have limited themselves to targeting just a few attorneys working for Trump, with the D.C. Bar pursuing Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Clark, in addition to the California State Bar’s attack on Eastman. But there is no limiting principle to prevent the bars in other states from pursuing any politician with a law license who happens to represent the wrong person.
That is an extremely dangerous precedent, which is why tomorrow at a press conference called by Eastman’s legal team, some big legal names will condemn the move. The hastily called conference is expected to bring together former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III and John Yoo, a current professor of law at the University of California-Berkley, former general counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and former deputy assistant attorney general. Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman and former California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown, among others, are also expected at the conference.
Whether the legacy media will cover Eastman’s detailed response to the State Bar of California’s disciplinary complaint or bother to report on his press conference remains to be seen. But if Cruz and the attorneys general impugned by the California State Bar speak out, the corrupt press may not have any choice but to report on the ridiculous theories underlying the disciplinary attacks on Eastman.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
Four Republican Texas state representatives asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday to review new transgender student policies for public schools. State Representatives Bryan Slaton, Brian Harrison, Tony Tinderholt, and Mark Dorazio signed a letter calling on Paxton to examine the Texas Association of School Boards’ (TASB) 2023 “radically pro-transgender” guidance, according to a copy of the letter tweeted by Slaton.
The representatives accuse TASB of disseminating legal advice that seems to discourage schools from reporting child abuse, denies parental rights, and claims female students don’t have legal protection to a private restroom or locker room, the letter stated.
“This radically pro-transgender legal advisory appears to encourage school districts to refrain from reporting child abuse and obscure information regarding children exhibiting gender dysphoria from their parents,” the four congressmen stated. “This document also makes a bold declaration that says young girls would have no law protecting them from having a school district permit a biological male to enter their restroom or locker room.
The TASB legal advice is “highly concerning” as it “may be effectively creating state policy,” they said.
The school board association said that having a transgender child use separate gender-neutral facilities could make some students “feel that such an arrangement negatively singles them out and isolates them from their peers,” according to the document.
“Consequently, the transgender student may request to use communal sex-specific facilities that match the student’s gender identity. There is no law that prohibits a district from granting the transgender student’s request to use these facilities,” TASB advised. “If other students or their parents object to the use of a sex-specific facility by a transgender student, a school district may be able to amicably address the competing interests by making individual-user facilities and private areas available for all students.”
The decision on whether students should play on sex-specific sports teams is in murky waters, according to the TASB letter. Despite Texas law requiring students to play on teams separated by their biological birth, TASB advises school districts to “assess each request individually and determine the best course of action based on a thorough evaluation of all of the issues and potential risks, and in consultation with the district’s attorney.”
TASB also counseled schools on the legality behind preventing unsupportive parents from knowing about their child’s gender dysphoria and choosing a different name or pronoun.
“Texas educators typically work with parents to decide on appropriate accommodations for transgender students. Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that transgender students are at particular risk of harm, including self-harm, when a parent disagrees with the student’s gender identity,” the document stated.
“As such, a student may request that a district employee not tell his or her parent about the student’s gender identity. School officials should proceed with caution in this case, in accordance with district policy regarding student counseling, crisis intervention, and child abuse,” TASB added.
Immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally sleep on a sidewalk near a migrant shelter on January 06, 2023, in El Paso, Texas. President Joe Biden visited El Paso on Sunday for his first-ever visit to the border in his decades-long career in politcs. U.S. Border authorities took into custody some 2.5 million illegal migrants in 2022, the highest number on record. | John Moore/Getty Images
Critics of the Biden administration’s handling of the immigration crisis at the U.S. southern border say President Joe Biden’s trip to Texas and Mexico amounted to a “photo-op” and expressed concern that the administration’s policies will only exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.
President Joe Biden visited the southwest border for the first time Sunday, as concerns grow about the high volume of illegal immigration negatively affecting U.S. citizens and border communities. Statistics compiled by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol show there were 465,034 encounters between migrants and law enforcement officials at the southwest border in the first two months of fiscal year 2023, which began in October. By comparison, just 339,682 encounters occurred during the same period in fiscal year 2022.
Biden’s border visit occurred against the backdrop of his administration’s efforts to abolish Title 42, which enables border officials to quickly turn away migrants seeking entry into the U.S. due to public health concerns posed by the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered Title 42 to remain in place as the justices are slated to hear a case involving the matter later this year. The abandonment of Title 42 is expected to cause the number of illegal border crossings to increase to an even higher figure.
The president announced his intention to visit the border city of El Paso, Texas, in a press conference last week. During the address, Biden laid out actions his administration was taking to address the surge at the U.S.-Mexico border, including the expansion of a parole program allowing Venezuelan migrants with sponsors in the U.S. to come to the country for two years and receive work permits as long as they pass a background check to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans.
The president predicted that expanding the parole program to three additional countries will “substantially reduce the number of people attempting to cross the southwest border without going through the legal process.” He contended that since the establishment of the existing parole program, “the number of Venezuelans trying to enter America without going through a legal process has dropped dramatically from about 1,100 per day to less than 250 per day on average.”
When Biden arrived in El Paso, Gov. Greg Abbott gave him a letter declaring that “your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late.”
Abbott added, “Your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry property owners whose lives have been destroyed by your border policies.”
Hand-delivered a letter to President Biden today during his first visit to the border.
His trip is billion too little & 2 years too late.
“Even the city you visit has been sanitized of the migrant camps which had overrun downtown El Paso because your Administration wants to shield you from the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis,” he wrote. “This chaos is a direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted.”
Abbott elaborated on the consequences of mass illegal immigration at the southwest border, including the emboldening of the drug cartels engaged in “trafficking deadly fentanyl and even human beings.” He told the president “when you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do.”
The Texas governor urged Biden to “comply with the many statutes mandating that various categories of aliens ‘shall’ be detained, and end the practice of unlawfully paroling aliens en masse,” stop “sandbagging” Title 42, “aggressively prosecute illegal entry between ports of entry, and allow ICE to remove illegal immigrants in accordance with existing federal laws,” immediately resume the construction of the border wall separating the U.S. from Mexico and “designate the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.”
Newly elected Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., issued a statement of his own, characterizing Biden’s visit to the border as a “photo-op,” suggesting that any calls for border security from the administration ring hollow as long as the president continues “pushing for amnesty for millions of immigrants who have crossed into the U.S. illegally.” McCarthy vowed that “House Republicans will hold him and [Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro] Mayorkas accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.”
Biden is making his first border visit of his life—a photo op—while pushing for amnesty for millions of immigrants who have crossed into the US illegally.
House Republicans will hold him and Mayorkas accountable for creating the most dangerous border crisis in American history.
Ahead of Biden’s visit to the border, the Democratic mayor of El Paso declared a state of emergency, citing the impacts of the migrant surge on his city. Critics of the Biden administration previously attributed the rise in illegal border crossings, which began at the beginning of his presidency in 2021, to the abandonment of the Migrant Protection Protocols that required those seeking asylum in the U.S. to remain in Mexico while their asylum claims were adjudicated.
During his speech last week, Biden touted the CBP ONE app, which enables migrants “to schedule an appointment at a port of entry and make their asylum claim there without crossing the border unlawfully.” Additionally, the White House released a fact sheet last week outlining additional actions the administration was taking to reduce illegal immigration at the southwest border.
Specifically, the fact sheet proclaimed that “… individuals who attempt to enter the United States without permission, do not have a legal basis to remain, and cannot be expelled pursuant to Title 42 will be increasingly subject to expedited removal from their country of origin and subject to a five-year ban on reentry.”
“DHS and DOJ are surging asylum officers and immigration judges to review asylum cases at the border more quickly — with the aim of reducing initial processing times from months to days,” the document added. The administration also intends to mobilize “faith-based and nonprofit organizations supporting migrants, including those providing temporary shelter, food, and humanitarian assistance.”
One of the things I get asked from time to time by readers is, what can ordinary people on the right, Christians and conservatives, do to help save the country — besides voting on Election Day?
It’s a good question, and it comes from the very understandable feeling of helplessness many people feel about the direction of the country and, let’s be honest, the collapse of Western civilization that’s now well underway. It’s especially easy to get frustrated after an election cycle like the one we just had, in which Republican leaders thoroughly botched it and left things more or less where they were before the voting. Put another way, if voting doesn’t really change anything in our so-called democracy, what will?
There’s an answer to this question, but you’re not going to like it. The plain truth is this: You’re going to have to save the country yourselves. Donald Trump isn’t going to save it. Ron DeSantis isn’t going to save it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that a GOP majority in Congress is going to save it.
By all means, keep voting in national elections. Keep making your voices heard at the ballot box. But salvation won’t come from Washington, D.C. If America is going to be saved, or even just parts of it are to be saved, then ordinary men and women, God-fearing patriots all across the country, are going to have to do it themselves, one town at a time. And they will have to do it the old-fashioned and unglamorous way, by taking over the local institutions of civic life, organizing and winning elections for city council and school board, finding reliable and competent people willing to be candidates and staff and volunteers.
It’s going to be a long, thankless slog, but there’s no other way. Neither is there any guarantee of success. I speak here only of towns and suburbs, not of cities, many of which have become unlivable after decades of failed Democrat governance and leftist policies. Conservatives who can manage it should move to places where they can join with other like-minded Americans to take back their communities and instill a civic culture that reflects their beliefs.
We got into this situation through passivity, and only a sustained effort at the local level will get us out. For decades, conservatives did nothing while the left marched through academia — and then kept right on marching, down from their ivory tower and into the public square, into the schools, the libraries, corporate boardrooms, local police and fire departments, even the churches. These people have radical views far outside the American mainstream but nevertheless control all our institutions. If you want them back, you’ll have to take them back, post by post.
This is not the kind of thing the right likes to hear. By temperament and principle, conservatives would rather be left alone to run their businesses, raise their families, worship in their churches, and build up their charities and local communities. Unlike liberals and leftists, they tend not to be ideologues. They are not trying to fundamentally change the country. They mostly want to be left alone.
But of course, they will never be left alone. The woke radicals will never stop — until someone stops them. A kind of conservative radicalism, or at least activism, is going to be required to accomplish that.
A good example of what I’m talking about is playing out in the small central Texas town of Taylor, population about 17,000. Taylor, some 35 miles north of Austin, is a rather conservative place of the sort you can find all over the country. It recently made national headlines over its traditional Christmas parade; a longstanding town tradition organized by a coalition of local churches. Last year, organizers accidentally approved a parade float for a group calling itself Taylor Pride, which the parade committee naively mistook for the name of a group that was just proud of their town. What they got instead was a float featuring two men dressed in drag, dancing suggestively in what paradegoers assumed was going to be a family-friendly event.
Parents and attendees were understandably perturbed. To ensure it didn’t happen again, the consortium of local churches that runs the parade sensibly decided that this year, parade floats must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values. The point wasn’t to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not — like the Taylor Pride drag queen float — contrary to Christian teachings.
The City of Taylor responded by announcing it would stage its own separate LGBT-friendly “holiday” parade, on the same night as the traditional Christmas parade, on the same route, following right behind it. The decision was made not by the elected members of the city council, who are accountable to voters, but by the municipal staff who actually run things. There was no public notice or deliberation and no consultation beforehand with members of the city council. The municipal bureaucracy acted on its own authority to use (or rather misuse) public funds and resources to sponsor a parade that was wildly out of step with the community at large.
Kevin Stuart, a Taylor resident and assistant professor of political science at the University of St. Thomas, wrote about all this recently in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the problem in Taylor has deep historical roots. The outsourcing of decision-making to so-called experts has been happening in American towns and cities for more than a century, such that professional bureaucrats now run small towns across America like “ideological colonizers.”
“There is now a yawning ideological gap between the people who live in American towns and the professionalized cadre of city staff who pass through those towns on their way up the career ladder,” writes Stuart. He goes on to argue that residents of towns like Taylor are partly to blame for ceding too much political power to an expert class whose interests and values don’t align with the people they’re supposed to serve.
He’s right about that — and also about how “communities can’t remain strong if they are unwilling to defend common sense and get involved in the political process.” The lesson of Taylor’s dueling Christmas parades is that even in small, conservative towns in deep-red states like Texas, conservatives can’t be complacent. As I wrote last month about the Taylor fracas, there’s nowhere Christians can run and hide from the left. They have to stand and fight.
In Taylor, that means residents who until now might have never been involved in local politics will have to roll up their sleeves, give up some weekday evenings, and get involved. They will have to put up their own conservative candidates and vote out of office the city councilors who empowered a woke municipal bureaucracy. They will have to fire the cadre of leftist bureaucrats who run things and replace them with their own people. They might even have to change the city charter so that elected members of the city council actually do the work of the public in City Hall, not an unelected city manager who sees the job as merely a steppingstone to a bigger city.
The same goes for the library, the school board, and every other local institution in every American town like Taylor. Conservatives have to take them over if they can. To answer the question we began with, that is what ordinary people can do. And they have to start now. No one is coming to help, and time is running out.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
Peter Doocy reports on growing crisis with Title 42 expected to end. Video footage obtained by Fox News shows a Border Patrol facility in El Paso, Texas, overwhelmed with migrant arrivals. State Rep. Tony Gonzales shot the video at the Border Patrol Central Processing Center on Friday. At that time, around 4,600 migrants were in federal custody despite capacity being only 1,040.
In a video taken Friday from Rep. Tony Gonalez, R-Tex., a Border Patrol Central Processing Center is seen at over four times its capacity with migrants. (Representative Tony Gonzalez)
The footage shows migrants crammed into the processing facility, many of them sprawled out on mattresses on the floor.
Migrants crammed into a processing facility. (Representative Tony Gonzalez)
A voice of the intercom can be heard calling out names while the migrants wait.
El Paso, like many towns along the U.S.-Mexico border, continues to witness an influx of migrants into its community. The city is also expecting a surge of migrants when Title 42, a Trump-era immigration policy that reduced the number of asylum seekers the U.S. would allow under the COVID pandemic, expires on Dec. 21.
Fox News’ Lawrence Richard contributed to this report.
Bradford Betz is a Fox News Digital breaking reporter covering crime, political issues, and much more.
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A Texas teacher and two aides have been arrested for allegedly abusing a 5-year-old special needs boy in 2021.
Three instructors employed at the Liberty Independent School District (ISD) were taken into custody in mid-November for alleged crimes committed during an alleged shocking incident on April 15, 2021. Teacher Melody Michel LaPointe, 47, and teaching assistants Tarah Michelle Tinney, 33, and Augusta Danielle Costlow, 27, were charged with four counts each of abandoning or endangering a child in imminent danger of bodily injury, a second-degree felony.
All three women were booked into the Liberty County Jail, and their bond was set at $60,000 each. All three are reportedly out on bond.
The teacher and instructional assistants are accused of isolating a special needs student in a room at a Liberty Independent School District facility. The 5-year-old boy was deprived of food and began eating his own feces and drinking his own urine, according to court documents.
The three instructors were reportedly responsible for the care of the young victim.
The indictment identified the victim as “R.W.,” and stated the instructors “intentionally abandoned [R.W.] in a place under circumstances that exposed [R.W.] to an unreasonable risk of harm, and under circumstances that a reasonable person would believe would place the child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment.”
Law & Crime reported, “The document explains that the alleged conduct involved confining R.W. ‘to an isolation room where he fell causing bodily injury’ and then failing to ‘voluntarily deliver the child to a designated emergency infant care provider’ as required by law.”
A spokesperson for Liberty ISD issued a statement on the disturbing accusations.
We immediately reported the matter to law enforcement and CPS, removed the educators who continued to work for us from the classroom, and conducted a comprehensive investigation. Based upon our investigation, we reported the educators to the State Board for Educator Certification and shared our results with law enforcement officials.
KTRK-TV reported, “According to a spokesperson for Liberty ISD, the two assistants were put on administrative leave during the investigation last year and then resigned once the investigation was completed. LaPointe, the main teacher in the classroom, was able to find work at another school district. She was recently working as a teacher for Bonnie P. Hopper Primary School in Goose Creek CISD.”
On Nov. 17, officials at the Hopper Primary School informed parents of the teacher’s arrest.
“In an effort of full transparency, we want to inform our families of an incident that occurred yesterday during dismissal. A teacher at Bonnie P. Hopper Primary School was arrested yesterday by Liberty County constables. The cause for arrest occurred in Liberty County and is not affiliated with Goose Creek CISD in any way. The teacher is currently placed on administrative leave with pay, pending the outcome of an investigation, after which the District will take appropriate disciplinary action. As this is a pending legal matter, Goose Creek CISD will allow the legal process to proceed and refrain from further comment. We want to ensure our families that the safety and security of your children is our #1 concern. We thank you for your continuous support of our campus and our district.
One of the comforting fictions conservatives are increasingly tempted to tell themselves is that if they just move to a red state or county, the insanity of the woke left won’t affect them and their family. Ensconced in safely Republican communities, perhaps they’ll be free not just from disastrous Democrat policies but also from the pernicious sexual propaganda of the left. For conservatives with children, this is especially important.
But it’s a mirage. There is no American town or hamlet remote or red enough to prevent the infiltration of leftist ideology, which today often comes from institutions that in an earlier era would have been seen as the guardians of a decidedly Christian civic virtue. Not only are left-wing activists taking over these institutions, but they are also working to ban conservatives, and especially Christians, from the public square altogether.
There is nowhere today that conservatives can run and hide from the left. They can either surrender or stand and fight.
Consider what’s playing out in the small town of Taylor, Texas, population 16,807. Situated about 40 miles northeast of deep-blue Austin, it has long been precisely the sort of place conservative families might move to raise their children — a quiet and peaceful town full of churches in a deep-red part of the Lone Star State.
For decades, Taylor has staged a Christmas — not “holiday” — parade down Main Street. The Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights is a beloved tradition that for the past 10 years or so has been organized under the auspices of the Taylor Area Ministerial Alliance, or TAMA, a coalition of local churches.
Last year, as a result of an oversight in the application process, an LGBT advocacy group called Taylor Pride was included in the parade. The oversight in this case was that the old ladies who volunteer to organize the parade and process float applications had never heard of a group called Taylor Pride and didn’t realize what it was. (And no wonder, before the summer of 2021 the group had never staged a public event.)
By the time parade organizers found out, it was too late. Two men dressed in drag, one as a female Santa and the other scantily clad in glitter, were suggestively gyrating to dance music on the Taylor Pride float as it rolled down Main Street in the annual Christmas parade — as it happened, right in front of a float for Saint Mary’s Catholic School, which was full of children.
Parents and attendees were understandably outraged. Soon after the parade, TAMA decided that in the future, parade entries must be consistent with traditional biblical and family values, and made an announcement to that effect ahead of this year’s parade. The point, as TAMA’s statement made clear, was not to exclude any individuals or groups from attending or even participating in the parade, but to ensure the floats were family-friendly and not contrary to Christian teachings.
In response, the Taylor City Council announced it would stage a separate, city-sponsored parade, calling it the “Very Merry Holiday Parade and Celebration” — on the same night as the traditional TAMA parade, following immediately behind it on the same route, for the express purpose of giving Taylor Pride and other LGBT groups a parade of their own. As a recent post on the City of Taylor’s official Facebook page explained, the city is doing this because “we are committed to being inclusive and diverse in the City of Taylor.”
A spokesman for the city has since falsely characterized the situation to at least one local news outlet, saying TAMA had “made it clear that they did not want certain people to be a part of the parade,” and, “They were going to go in a little bit of a different direction … and make it a little bit more exclusive.”
This is exactly the opposite of what’s happened. The only thing that’s changed is that TAMA has realized that LGBT groups like Taylor Pride have targeted their town and attempted, with some success, to infiltrate and undermine their traditional civic celebrations of Christmas. So they decided to push back and insist on the survival of their traditions. Good for them.
The point here is that Taylor might as well be every conservative community in America. It’s located in Texas’s 31st Congressional District, one of two congressional districts in Texas that have never been represented by a Democrat. Voters there just reelected Republican Rep. John Carter for the 11th time. He ran unopposed. Taylor also sits in Williamson County, where nearly every elected office is held by a Republican.
Indeed, Taylor is the last place in the country where a family attending a Christmas parade organized by a coalition of local churches would expect to see two men in drag dancing inappropriately on a float rolling down Main Street. Yet like many such towns across the country, the city council and municipal staff are eager to prove just how enlightened and woke they are. Send in the drag queen holiday floats.
By now, Christians in Taylor must surely know that next year, there will be only one parade down Main Street in December — and it won’t be the Taylor Christmas Parade of Lights. Unless they vote the city council out of office and clean house in City Hall, traditions like the Christmas parade will soon be a thing of the past there, another lost battle in a never-ending war of attrition waged by the left. Same goes for the public library and the public schools. If conservatives don’t take them over, the left will.
It might just be one small town in Texas, but Taylor stands as a cautionary tale. It isn’t enough to move to a red state or a Republican district. You are going to have to fight the left, and win, or surrender to them. There is nowhere left to hide.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
In a direct rebuke to Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s radical abortion agenda, the City Council of Hobbs, New Mexico, unanimously voted last week to become a sanctuary city for the unborn. Overwhelming support for and passage of the ordinance mean abortion is now classified as murder and outlawed within Hobbs city limits. It also means that any blue politicians or abortion facilities that try to go against the city’s wishes could face an uphill legal battle.
The vote was vehemently opposed by Lujan Grisham, who called the architects of the ordinance “out-of-state extremists.” The governor’s reaction is no surprise considering her own history of abortion extremism.
Shortly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Lujan Grisham signed an executive order designating $10 million in taxpayer funds toward the development of an abortion facility in Doña Ana County, an area that shares a border with El Paso, Texas. That was just a couple of months after Lujan Grisham signedan executive order “protecting medical providers from attempts at legal retribution” for granting abortions and refusing to comply with other states’ abortion extradition laws.
“As more states move to restrict and prohibit access to reproductive care, New Mexico will continue to not only protect access to abortion, but to expand and strengthen reproductive health care throughout the state,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement. “Today, I reaffirm my resolve to make sure that women and families in New Mexico — and beyond — are supported at every step of the way.”
Since then, abortion dominated the state’s political scene and even became a focal point in Lujan Grisham’s re-election race against Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, one of the nation’s largest dealers of abortion, previously told Reuters that Lujan Grisham’s friendliness toward abortion led her to consider relocating some of their Texas facilities closer to the border with New Mexico.
The goal was to offer abortion to women in neighboring Texas cities such as Lubbock, which voted to become a sanctuary city for the unborn in May of 2021, following the Lone Star State’s ban on abortion via the Texas Heartbeat Act.
Residents of Hobbs, a nearly 40,000-person town, however, weren’t taking any chances on getting swept up in Lujan Grisham’s pro-abortion executive spree. The pro-life community in Hobbs as well as the nearby city of Clovis revolted with the introduction of ordinances designed to protect unborn babies.
The threat of legal challenges thanks to widespread support for those sanctuary city ordinances, Hagstrom Miller confessed, “has given her pause about operating in eastern New Mexico.”
“In this post-Dobbs era, where anti-abortion folks are emboldened, I want to be sure we’re in a place where our patients can be safe, where our doctors and our staff can be safe,” she said.
The Clovis City Commission postponed its vote on the ordinance allegedly so it can “perfect the language to better protect against litigation.” “We hope this sends the message to our state legislature that there are pro-life cities out there and we want to self-determine on this issue,” Clovis Mayor Mike Morris said shortly after a vote to advance the ban.
If Clovis passes the ordinance, it will join Hobbs and a myriad of other towns that all recently decided to push back against Democrats’ abortion extremism.
“Between Governor Abbott’s resounding defeat of Robert Francis O’Rourke to four more municipalities joining over fifty towns with existing sanctuary city for the unborn ordinances, this is an exciting time for Texans as we work to end abortion,” Texas Right to Life President Dr. John Seago told The Federalist. “Additionally, as the abortion industry looks to target Texas women from just outside our borders, it is equally exciting that Hobbs, New Mexico has joined the fight and passed the ordinance to keep the desperate abortion industry out of their city limits.”
The pro-life movements in Texas and New Mexico have been so effective recently that they’ve even earned the wrath of the Biden White House.
“We have been very clear about what MAGA extreme Republicans are trying to do when it comes to a woman’s rights to choose,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during a recent trip to New Mexico with President Joe Biden. “They’re trying to take that away, clearly, and in the most extreme ways. What it’s doing is it’s putting women — women and girls’ lives at risk.”
This article was updated on 11/16 to reflect that members of the Clovis City Commission are no longer unanimously “expected to vote in favor of the ban.”
“The Ordinance, as it stands now, is ready. The commission, however, is unready and unwilling,” Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, told The Federalist.
Dickson also said that Clovis Mayor Mike Morris is facing backlash after he was “pressured by several Republicans to push things past the election and even past the legislative session.”
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire and Fox News. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.
Over the weekend, a church in Texas became a lightning rod for protesters and counter-protesters alike when it invited members of “all ages” to a drag event to support so-called “trans and exploring” minors.
On Saturday evening, the First Christian Church of Katy, Texas, an affiliate of the Disciples of Christ denomination, held a bingo event featuring drag queens that was billed as fun for the whole family.
“We create a place for people to feel welcomed and understand that there will always be people who disagree with us,” said Reverend Heather Tolleson, the pastor of the church.
The purpose of the bingo event — and the adults-only drag show later that night — was to raise funds for the church’s “Transparent Closet,” a resource where “trans and exploring teens, youth and young adults” can find cross-sex clothing, shoes, and accessories such as makeup.
The church itself claims to be “a place where all are welcome,” and nearly all of the events and ministries listed on its website refer to LGBTQ issues in some way.
However, the all-ages drag event outraged many others in the community, including parents and members of other churches, who claim that drag queens and those who sponsor them have no business marketing such entertainment to children.
Rebecca Clark, a member of the Fort Bend-based County Citizens Defending Freedom, denounced the drag bingo event.
“We are done tolerating the exploitation and sexualization of our children in this country,” Clark told the Epoch Times.
“Drag queens and children don’t mix,” added Sarah Feigleson of CCDF. “These events are happening in your back yard. Stand up and raise a respectful ruckus.”
Along with CCDF, members of the Proud Boys protested the event, as did other churches. Several Catholics prayed the rosary.
On the other side of the street stood supporters of the family drag bingo day. Members of Antifa wore all black and obscured their faces. Others who were not associated with Antifa proudly showed their identities and their support for exposing kids to LGBTQ-themed entertainment.
“Drag in itself is just a costume,” said one unnamed man wearing a face mask and holding a pride flag. “It’s no different than someone dressed up like a superhero at a comic convention or someone who puts on a Halloween costume.”
Both sides were heavily armed, and a steady police presence remained in the middle of the road to help keep the peace during drag bingo night. There were no reports of violence or arrests, and only church members were allowed to enter the property.
Though the event itself was controversial, there was yet another aspect of it that drew further ire from critics. The event was originally supposed to feature drag queen Tisha Flowers, aka Jaysen Kettl. Not only does Kettl now don a macabre persona when dressed as Flowers, but he also has a troubling past. Back in 2004, Kettl, then 17, pled guilty to conspiracy to commit capital murder after administrators at his school learned that he and at least one other student had plotted to commit a mass school shooting. Thankfully, the plot was foiled before anyone could carry it out.
However, once Kettl’s criminal history was made known, the church quietly removed him from event promotions. It is unclear whether Kettl attended the event.
Despite the controversy, the event sold out and was deemed a success, Rev. Tolleson claimed.
Earlier this month, a Washington Post editorial acknowledged there was “no end in sight to the procession of buses inbound” to Washington, D.C., and praised Mayor Muriel Bowser for earmarking $10 million for the nearly 10,000 illegal immigrants who have arrived in the capital — about 15 percent of whom intend to remain there.
The Biden administration pretends it has the burgeoning problem of illegal immigration under control. Late last month, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that people aren’t just walking across the border. And just last week, Vice President Kamala Harris insisted the border was “secure.”
Much of the national media are happy to play along with this deliberate deception. The same corporate media that last year blithely ignored the federal government’s mass, midnight airlifting of illegal immigrants to New York; Jacksonville, Florida; and points beyond are now obsessed when a southern governor flies 50 Venezuelans to swanky Martha’s Vineyard.
In their eyes, when the administration ships tens of thousands of illegal immigrants under cover of darkness, it’s no big deal. But if the Post spots 50 people flown into Martha’s Vineyard, somehow, it’s a “crisis.” The media never accused the administration of using migrants as pawns or being inhumane, yet the latter is doing exactly what Texas and Arizona are on a vast scale.
The Post’s editors argue that “state and local officials nationwide must accommodate a flow of migrants — in schools, shelters, streets” as if there is no alternative. They seem unaware that for 250 years, the United States had an immigration law and that, for much of that time, the executive branch did its job, enforcing the law and defending our border.
What the open-borders, sanctuary-city crowd are at last realizing is that their blank checks can be cashed. New York and Washington’s social services are drowning under a mere 10,000 arrivals each. They’re lucky not to be El Paso (population 684,000), which is dealing with 1,400 illegal migrants arriving per day, or Yuma (population 97,000), which has received 250,000 so far this year.
Mayor Bowser’s $10 million might sound like a lot but putting just 200 people in hotel rooms in Washington at $200 per night comes out to upwards of $15 million annually, and educating the “about 70” new illegal immigrant children now enrolled in D.C. public schools will cost a couple million more for the first year. What happens next year?
New York City already has 7,600 migrants in its homeless shelters, which are 99 percent full, and is struggling to find housing for 5,000 new arrivals. As if trying to put out a fire with an eye-dropper, the city has opened a $6.7 million “welcome center” in Manhattan to receive migrants arriving by bus. Cost estimates for housing the city’s noncitizens already exceed $300 million a year. To complicate things, New York requires residents to spend at least 90 days in a shelter before being eligible for housing vouchers. It also requires a background check to verify applications. This normally takes a month, but it will presumably longer to process illegal immigrants who have no records that can be checked.
Even assuming all the new arrivals actually claim asylum, the average wait for an initial hearing in New York is over three years. In the meantime, they will be public charges on the city’s schools, hospitals, and housing. How long will New York taxpayers put up with this? Well, Mayor Eric Adams has admitted that the city is reaching the end of its rope, and officials are now said to be reconsidering their “right to shelter” commitment to house unlimited foreign indigents on top of New York’s plentiful home-grown needy.
New York and Washington actually look tough compared to Chicago. Mayor Lori Lightfoot proudly signed a “Welcoming City” ordinance in February 2021 to stop city police from working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But when the first busloads of 50 migrants arrived in early September, she packed them off to neighboring Burr Ridge without telling its mayor.
Later, when 500 migrants arrived in Chicago, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared an emergency and called out the National Guard. Coincidentally, Chicago has suffered almost the same number (491) of murders this year, but that’s not considered an emergency worthy of mobilizing the guard.
How long will this game of pass-the-parcel continue? Migrants deserve to be treated with dignity and compassion. However, that does not require those who enter illegally to stay here — on the taxpayer’s dime — until our overwhelmed immigration courts can get around to hearing their cases. Under the Migrant Protection Protocols, they could be housed outside our borders while their cases are considered. Even if not, ICE has to be allowed to do its duty, and those who fail to file for asylum or whose cases are denied after due process should be quickly deported as the law requires. It’s time President Biden stopped denying the crisis at the southern border and accepted the truth. Only then can we work for a national solution to the ongoing migrant crisis.
A former State Department official, Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Affairs.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has announced that a group of migrants was bused from the Lone Star State to Chicago, Illinois. The governor had already been busing migrants from Texas to Washington, D.C., and New York City, though the trips are undertaken voluntarily. Now, the Windy City will be another destination for migrants who opt for such a trip.
“President Biden’s inaction at our southern border continues putting the lives of Texans—and Americans—at risk and is overwhelming our communities,” Abbott said, according to a press release. “To continue providing much-needed relief to our small, overrun border towns, Chicago will join fellow sanctuary cities Washington, D.C. and New York City as an additional drop-off location. Mayor [Lori] Lightfoot loves to tout the responsibility of her city to welcome all regardless of legal status, and I look forward to seeing this responsibility in action as these migrants receive resources from a sanctuary city with the capacity to serve them.”
The first bus of migrants transported from Texas to the nation’s capital arrived in April, and earlier this month, the first bus arrived in the Big Apple. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has twice requested the deployment of the D.C. National Guard to assist amid the migrant influx, but both times the Pentagon has rebuffed the mayor’s requests.
“As a city, we are doing everything we can to ensure these immigrants and their families can receive shelter, food, and most importantly protection. This is not new; Chicago welcomes hundreds of migrants every year to our city and provides much-needed assistance,” a spokesperson for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office said in a statement. “Unfortunately, Texas Governor Greg Abbott is without any shame or humanity. But ever since he put these racist practices of expulsion in place, we have been working with our community partners to ready the city to receive these individuals.”
NEWS: Today, the City of Chicago received confirmation that approximately 60 migrants were traveling to Chicago by way of Texas. Chicago is a welcoming city and as such has collaborated across various departments and agencies to ensure we greeted them with dignity and respect. pic.twitter.com/wJWEDtXLgZ
A Texas store clerk fought back against a robber who attacked her with a knife last week, shooting the suspect multiple times and landing him in the hospital. Beaumont Police got a call about a robbery in progress at the Everest Food Mart in the 2800 block of Eastex Freeway around 11:30 p.m. last Friday, KBMT-TV reported. While police were on their way to the scene, the station said they were told the store clerk shot the robber multiple times. Police arrived at the store within minutes of receiving the initial call, KBMT said.
Image source: KBMT-TV videos screenshot
Officer Haley Morrow told the station’s news crew at the scene that a store clerk called and said a man entered the store with a knife and robbed her, KBMT reported, adding that the clerk suffered minor injuries. A preliminary investigation determined the robber displayed a knife and attacked the clerk prior to her shooting him, the Port Arthur News reported.
Officer Morrow emphasized to the station that crime victims have the right to defend themselves.
“Essentially, you know, we see the aggravated robberies often; in a lot of cases what we don’t see is … a victim fight back and defend themselves,” she noted to the KBMT. “But, you know, we want to make sure that people understand that they do have that right.”
Officer Haley MorrowImage source: KBMT-TV video screenshot
The suspect was identified as 62-year-old William Coleman of Beaumont, KBMT said, adding that he was taken to an area hospital for treatment for serious injuries. Coleman later was charged with aggravated robbery, the station said.
Once Coleman is released from the hospital, he will be taken to the Jefferson County Jail and held on a $250,000 bond, KBMT reported.
Democrats love to talk about democracy — mostly about how it’s under threat from Republicans and “Christian nationalists” and anyone who opposes their agenda. But at least on a rhetorical level, they seem to cherish democracy and rightly think that a government of the people, by the people is the surest safeguard against tyranny.
In practice, though, they hate democracy and will use every tool at their disposal to subvert and destroy it. Hardly a day goes by that Democrats don’t proclaim as much by their actions. Just look at their response to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last month, which triggered laws in more than a dozen states banning or placing new restrictions on abortion. Voters in those states elected the people who passed these new laws, which in many cases are broadly popular. By overturning Roe, the court breathed new life into the democratic process, returning an issue to the American people that an earlier Supreme Court had snatched away from them.
But Democrats don’t really want democracy when it comes to abortion, which they consider sacrosanct. They have no qualms about protecting it from regulations by state lawmakers through the raw exercise of federal executive power, if need be. This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland threatened to sue states that have outlawed or restricted abortion since the end of Roe, and he also said the Justice Department would try to get a judge to toss a Texas lawsuit that would block newly issued rules from the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Health and Human Services forcing doctors to perform abortions in emergency rooms.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Garland’s DOJ said last week it had launched a special task force to “evaluate state laws that hinder women’s ability to seek abortions in other states where the procedure remains legal or that ban federally approved medication that terminates a pregnancy.” The task force will also “oppose state efforts to penalize federal employees” who perform abortions “authorized by federal law.”
What could that mean? Well, take a look at the lawsuit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just filed against HHS. The administration is trying to use the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) to force ER doctors to perform abortions, even if it contravenes state laws outlawing the procedure. EMTALA was passed in 1986 as a way to prevent “patient dumping,” or turning away people who couldn’t pay, and it requires hospitals that receive Medicare money (which today is all of them) to treat people who show up at an ER in need of emergency treatment.
The Texas lawsuit argues the Biden administration is trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic,” and that “EMTALA does not authorize — and has never authorized — the federal government to compel healthcare providers to perform abortions.”
Garland and HHS claim that EMTALA preempts state law, but it’s unclear what that means in the context of the new HHS rules. If a state legislature passed a law saying that emergency rooms are prohibited from treating patients who have no health insurance, then yes, EMTALA would preempt that.
But as Paxton’s lawsuit rightly notes, the law says nothing about abortion, nor does it say anything about which specific treatments a hospital ER must administer. It only states that Medicare-participating hospitals have to provide “stabilizing treatment” for “emergency medical conditions,” and it specifically defines both of those terms in the statute.
For Democrats, though, laws passed by representatives of the people don’t carry as much weight as rule by administrative fiat. On July 11, the Biden administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued “guidance” purportedly reminding hospitals of their obligations under EMTALA. But the guidance was much more than a reminder, and it was accompanied by a letter from HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra that amounted to an abortion mandate for hospitals, asserting powers under EMTALA that simply don’t exist anywhere in federal law.
First, Becerra’s letter claims that if an ER doctor determines that “abortion is the stabilizing treatment necessary to resolve [an emergency medical condition as defined by EMTALA], the physician must provide that treatment.”
But this is nothing more than a cheap word game. Abortion isn’t a “stabilizing treatment,” and nowhere in federal law is it construed as such. Becerra is conflating Democrats’ loose rhetoric about abortion — that it’s “reproductive healthcare” or “women’s health” — with the straightforward reality of the federal EMTALA statute, which says nothing about abortion and, to the contrary, specifically includes a mention of an “emergency medical condition” as one that threatens the life of an unborn child.
Second, Becerra’s false claim that EMTALA preempts state abortion laws is contradicted by the plain language of the law itself, which says it doesn’t preempt state law “except to the extent that the requirement directly conflicts with a requirement” of EMTALA. But abortion is not a requirement of EMTALA and doesn’t even fit the law’s definition of “stabilizing treatment” for an “emergency medical condition.”
In a decent country, Texas would easily win this lawsuit — and the Justice Department would never step in to try to get it thrown out. But Democrats are committed to subverting the democratic process at both the state and federal level in order to preserve some shred of their abortion regime. They’re trying to preempt state laws they don’t like by twisting the meaning of federal laws that don’t have anything to say about abortion.
Remember that the next time you hear President Biden or some other leading Democrat talk about “threats to democracy.” They don’t care about democracy, they care about power. And they will use every ounce of it they have to advance their policies — the will of the people be damned.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
The American Academy of Pediatrics called for “reproductive justice” and advocated for pediatricians helping minors get abortions without their parents’ knowledge in the July issue of its official journal Pediatrics. Like other pro-abortion advocates who exploit young and vulnerable girls to advance their agenda — as in the recent viral story of the 10-year-old Ohio rape victim — the article used the story of a 14-year-old Guatemalan immigrant girl to argue for a more “holistic approach to reproductive rights that considers factors such as race, language, and socioeconomic status on the reproductive health of women.”
According to the article, the girl experienced complications after taking the abortion drug misoprostol and went to a facility that gave her a surgical abortion and helped her with the “judicial bypass” process so she could do it without her parents’ knowledge. After the abortion, the girl received a Nexplanon implant — a type of birth control that increases the chance that any pregnancy that occurs will be ectopic and puts the female at greater risk of blood clots, heart attacks, and strokes.
The academy’s takeaway from this story, which it foisted upon its readers, was that the “pediatric community” should “advocate for reproductive policies that expand access to care for adolescent patients.” In other words, it thinks doctors should push for making it easier for kids to abort their own children. Further, the American Academy of Pediatrics wants to hide this from minors’ parents and couches its concern in terms of the “deeply intertwined social, economic, and cultural barriers” of racial minorities.
“Now more than ever, training programs should ensure that pediatric residents competently provide culturally sensitive, nonjudgmental counseling around abortion care, contraception, and judicial bypass,” the article said.
Dr. George Fidone, who has a large private practice with five clinics in Texas, told The Federalist that the journal has become increasingly left-leaning. “Years ago the lead article might be on meningitis or pneumonia or a new vaccine or whatever,” he said. “Now it’s all about trans health, gender fluidity, how we’re supposed to counsel people, starting at very young ages, about the notion of gender fluidity or whatever.”
The article also said the academy “joined 38 other physician groups in opposing the passage of Texas Senate Bill 8,” which prohibits abortions after a baby’s heartbeat can be detected.
“So the American Academy of Pediatrics is advocating for the wholesale murder of unborn children,” Fidone said. “What? What has the state of our academy become?”
Olivia Hajicek is an intern at The Federalist and a junior at Hillsdale College studying history and journalism. She has covered campus and city news as a reporter for The Hillsdale Collegian. You can reach her at olivia.hajicek@gmail.com.
The full 77-minute video has been released from the day 19 children and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The full video, which includes a hallway surveillance camera and a bodycam from one officer, was obtained by the Austin American-Statesman. The outlet posted the four-minute edited collection of excerpts on its website. It posted the full video on its YouTube page.
The edited video begins with the gunman crashing the pickup truck he was driving, and then moving to the school after shooting at witnesses across the street and firing shots in the school parking lot.
WARNING: The following video contains images and audio that viewers will find disturbing.
“The video tells in real time the brutal story of how heavily armed officers failed to immediately launch a cohesive and aggressive response to stop the shooter and save more children if possible. And it reinforces the trauma of those parents, friends and bystanders who were outside the school and pleaded with police to do something, and for those survivors who quietly called 911 from inside the classroom to beg for help,” Statesman reporter Tony Plohetski wrote.
“The kids are running,” a woman calls out during the video in a 911 call, adding “Oh my God.”
Panic-stricken screams are heard as a woman orders children into their rooms.
The excerpt then continues with the shooter entering the school, peering around a corner to rooms 111 and 112, before sauntering down the hallway holding his rifle. The video captures one boy emerging from a bathroom. The boy peers around the corner and looks at the shooter, who is farther down the hall, before running away upon hearing the first shots.
Officials have said in the next two and a half minutes, about 100 rounds were fired, according to the Daily Mail.
Gunfire continues.
A few moments later, the first officers arrive.
Three officers approach the classroom warily with drawn weapons. A burst of gunfire erupts, sending the officers running. One officer holds his head as if he was struck.
The clip video then cuts to 19 minutes later, then 31 minutes later, as more officers with guns and a ballistic shield arrive. Officers continue to wait. Four shots are heard.
“They’re making entry,” an officer says, but nothing happens.
At 12:30 p.m. local time, an officer squirts hand sanitizer from a wall-mounted dispenser and rubs his hands together. Officers appear to be discussing alternate ways to enter the classroom.
At 12:50, officers breach the classroom, killing the gunman.
NEW: Recently, I viewed the hallway video from Robb Elementary School and I'm equally as haunted today as I have been. As journalists, we argue for transparency, but rest assured that once it is finally released, it is as wrenching as it seems. https://t.co/M49gOQGLmt
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has proposed two charges against the Border Patrol agents involved in the alleged “whipping” of migrants in Del Rio, Texas, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The first charge is for “poor judgment” for instructing noncitizens “to go back to Mexico, or words to that effect,” while the second is for “unsafe conduct” for maneuvering the agent’s horse “in a way that caused a noncitizen to fall backward into the Rio Grande River … thereby compromising the safety of the noncitizen, yourself, and your horse.”
These proposals are not yet final, and CBP is expected to announce the results of its investigation into the agents as soon as Friday, according to people familiar with the matter not authorized to speak publicly. It’s unclear how many agents will be charged.
“You knew or should have known that using your horse to block a noncitizen from exiting the water at the boat ramp created an unsafe situation, particularly for the noncitizen, but also for you and your horse,” the charges read.
“We consider that your misconduct received significant media attention and had a negative impact on the reputation of the Agency,” the charges added.
Several Democratic politicians characterized the images as “whipping,” as well as some migrant advocacy groups and human rights organizations. The White House also repeatedly condemned the behavior of the agents that day.
US Border Patrol agents try to stop Haitian migrants entering an encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande in Del Rio, Texas.
US says it will ramp up deportation flights for migrants flooding into Del Rio as authorities scramble to alleviate a burgeoning crisis
CBP sent out proposed disciplinary actions, an anonymous Department of Homeland Security source, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told the DCNF. An announcement on the results of the investigation is “imminent,” according to Fox News.
“From the beginning, they had been convicted by the White House and DHS, so we figured something was coming,” National Border Patrol Council President for the Del Rio border sector Jon Anfinsen previously told the DCNF.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas promised to complete the investigation in “days, not weeks.” But, the results have yet to be shared nearly a year later.
“But for them to claim that it was going to be resolved in days and weeks was, frankly, a joke from the beginning to decide if these guys had done something wrong, despite no investigation having been done. So they’re trying to save face and propose some kind of discipline just so they can justify their claims from day one,” Anfinsen said.
Neither CBP nor DHS responded to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
Ahandful of Texas counties on Tuesday declared the ongoing border crisis an “invasion” and called on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to do the same, citing constitutional authority for states to act in self-defense in the face of federal inaction.
Speaking in rural Kinney County, which includes a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border, officials from Kinney, Uvalde, and Goliad counties said the Biden administration has refused to secure the border and enforce the law, and that although Abbott has done much to support local communities in south Texas most affected by the crisis, he needs to do more. Namely, he needs to follow their lead and declare an invasion.
County officials of course can’t do anything about illegal immigration on their own, but their argument is that Abbott, as governor of Texas, can. They cite Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which says that states can’t do things like conduct foreign policy or engage in war, “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.”
Those three words, “unless actually invaded,” are the crux of the argument. The idea that states have the constitutional power to act on their own to enforce immigration law and police the border has been gaining ground for some time now. Former Trump administration officials such as Russ Vought and Ken Cuccinelli, both now at the Center for Renewing America, have made a case for unilateral state action on the border.
HUGE.
Our constitutional solution to the border crisis is live!
For the first time in U.S. history an INVASION has been declared (outside of Congress) by several counties in Texas.
— Center for Renewing America (@amrenewctr) July 5, 2022
Cuccinelli, former acting deputy Homeland Security secretary under Trump, was at the press conference on Tuesday in Texas. “This is the first time in American history that a legal authority has found, as a matter of law, that the United States is being invaded,” he said, later adding, “What we’re talking about is an operation that looks a lot like Title 42.”
That is, declaring an “invasion” means that state law enforcement, at the direction of the Texas governor, would directly arrest and expel to Mexico illegal immigrants in much the same manner as Border Patrol and U.S. Customs and Border Protection does now under Title 42, the pandemic health order that allows federal authorities to expel illegal immigrants with minimal processing.
So far, Abbott has been reluctant to take this route, instead attempting lesser measures such as arresting and prosecuting illegal border-crossers for criminal trespass or ordering onerous state inspections at ports of entry as a way to pressure his Mexican counterparts into stopping migrants in Mexico before they cross the border.
These lesser measures, however, haven’t done anything to stem the flow of illegal immigration, which continues, month over month, to set new records. Perhaps it’s time for Abbott to listen to these local officials, and also to people like Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, who was also at the press conference Tuesday and said, “We should declare an invasion and, as Texas, turn people away.”
Arguably, Abbott already bought into this more expansive constitutional interpretation of state authority when he struck security agreements with the governors of the four Mexican states bordering Texas back in April. (Never mind that the agreements were mostly for show, given the corruption of Mexican officialdom in these states.) After all, Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution says that states are not allowed to “enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded.”
By entering into security agreements with “another State, or a foreign Power,” it would seem Abbott has tacitly acknowledged not only that his state has been “actually invaded,” but that he has the constitutional authority to act in its defense. If that’s the case, why not take the next step and avail himself of the considerable law enforcement (and military) resources at his disposal to secure the border and expel illegal immigrants?
Maybe Abbott, secure in the state capital of Austin, is just taking longer to reach this conclusion than the people of south Texas, who are bearing the brunt of the border crisis. Indeed, among the hundreds of thousands of people crossing the border illegally every month now are a not insignificant number of people who do not want to be arrested, and whose presence on U.S. territory could reasonably be considered hostile. Unlike the migrant families who turn themselves in to the first Border Patrol agent they see, these people often attempt to evade the authorities, which gives rise to things like high-speed chases through small towns and over private lands. Across Texas border communities, this has become a serious and worsening problem since President Biden took office.
Del Rio, Texas 3 pursuits at the same time 2 on the same road just a few miles apart. Texas DPS arrested both smugglers🇺🇸💪 pic.twitter.com/RJSpP7pKUP
Some of those chases end in damaged property; some end in fatal car crashes. Sometimes the attempt to evade detection ends not with a chase but a horrifying tragedy like the one in San Antonio last month, where 53 migrants were found dead in a tractor-trailer.
Corporate media outlets, to the extent they cover the border crisis at all, will likely only mention efforts to declare the crisis an invasion in order to mock it or smear the people arguing for it as racists and bigots. But it is not some crackpot idea. In February, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich issued a legal opinion affirming that the border crisis constitutes an invasion and that the governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, has the authority under the Constitution to secure its border with Mexico.
In his legal opinion, Brnovich argued that the meaning of the word “invade,” as used in Article I of the Constitution, “covers the activities of the transnational cartels and gangs at the border—they enter Arizona ‘in [a] hostile manner’; they ‘enter as an enemy, with a view to … plunder’; they ‘attack,’ ‘assail,’ and ‘assault’; and they ‘infringe,’ ‘encroach on,’ and ‘violate’ Arizona.”
Ducey, like Abbott, has thus far balked at the idea of using state law enforcement to police the border directly. But as the crisis drags on, each month breaking the previous month’s record for arrests, border-state governors might be forced to test the limits of their authority. The incentives to do so are only going to mount as the crisis worsens.
And anyway, if there’s a constitutional question to be settled here, why not step forward now, set down a marker, enforce the law, and see how it plays out? If states really have no power to repel an invasion, no ability to defend their people and police their borders in the face of federal inaction, then we might as well admit now that we no longer live in a constitutional republic, and that states, whatever they once were, have been reduced to nothing more than administrative units of a centralized regime in Washington. There’s a word for such a political arrangement: empire.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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