How Not to Handle the Border Problem
Greg Abbott, well known for doing everything wrong, is already sitting in seat 1A on the Crazy Train to 2022. Because he has primary opponents to his right (if that’s even possible), he’s desperately trying to get farther right and has already targeted women, minorities, women who are minorities, children, the poor, the sick, and anyone not in perfect health. As part of this targeting, Abbott had the great idea of taking immigration at the southern border away from the feds and empowered local law enforcement and state police to arrest anyone they suspected of crossing the border and being on private property. The charge? Trespassing. The scheme includes not bothering with constitutional rights by quickly convicting, then jailing the immigrants. When their sentences are served, they are then sent to the Border Patrol for deportation. It’s illegal as hell, and Abbott knows it, but doesn’t care.
About 1,300 people have been prosecuted under Abbott’s scheme, and apparently that’s not enough, so apparently what’s happening is that when local law enforcement finds someone crossing the border on federal or federal land, the walk them to a ranch or other private property, THEN arrest them for trespassing. The Val Verde County prosecutor just dropped trespassing charges against 11 men who claim they were apprehended, marched to a private ranch and ordered to climb a fence onto the property when they were promptly arrested. Conveniently, there was no police body cam video from any of the officers involved in the arrest. The case was so sketchy that the prosecutor determined the arrest was not prosecutable.
As anyone who is paying attention knows, the problem here is not fixed at the border. It’s fixed in countries south of the border by forcing (and funding) countries in Mexico, Central and South America to root out corruption and crime as well as providing economic opportunity in these people’s home countries. We also simply must stop allowing immigration to be a once every two years wedge issue and reform the system of entering the country into a workable system rather than allowing chaos to reign. There is a solution to this problem, and politicians like Abbott are the wrong people to find it.
Politicians like Abbott don’t want to find the solution to the problem. It’s way too easy to campaign on a wall that everyone knows will never be built and wouldn’t work even if it did. Life is a whole lot easier when you can blow up a problem in people’s minds and then talk about how the other side wants to make it much worse.
1A-butt is walking that same self-woven tightrope that QOP politicians have walked since before Eisenhower. Solve the problem? Not if the pols think they can keep their donor base happy without a nonending source of cheap labor. To keep their happy hordes of haters hooked on the race bait that keeps them dutifully marching in lockstep to the polls to vote against their own interests, then removing the phantom scapegoat is a nonplayer, too.
2Now we see that over 53 million of the 54 million raised for the wall came from one Trump donor who made a donation of stock.
3Reading in the Pandora Papers about these Central American dictators and their hidden money, and then seeing these poor people that just want a chance – makes me wish I had a magic wand and dictators are jailed and folks that just want to wake up every day and eat could all be possible!
4A-butt’s behavior is another example of what happens with unceasing, decades-long one party rule in a state. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely.
Of course, not all Texans agree with what Greg is up to:
https://www.dallasweekly.com/articles/op-ed-f-you-greg-abbott/
5It is odd that people don’t see this as a problem of food, shelter, and medical aid. If those needs were met, it would not be a crisis. In stead we are trying to decide how mean to be to these helpless people. It is not our finest hour.
6G. Foresight, great piece, and like Frank Herbert said, power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.
7I read today that prosecutor is thinking about dropping all trespassing charges after some of the arrested proved the agents moved them onto private property and then arrested them for trespassing.
Magats can’t do anything right and A-Butt is one of the worst.
8Abott and his ilk are not acting very Christ-like.
9OT, but still about abutt- a federal judge has blocked a signature bill of his. The anti women’s rights abortion bill has been blocked by a federal judge. I’m sure this isn’t the end but….. now if his voting rights bill could be blocked
10That’s entrapment, pure and simple. All the cases should be dropped.
11What is going to be interesting, is how he will be B*itch slapped by the Feds because he knows immigration is a Federal concern and states cannot just decide to “take over” the responsability.
Didn’t he try something similar a couple of years ago?
Hello, DOJ, and ACLU, are you listening?
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