Texas Governor Greg Abbott has criticized President Biden

on

On Thursday, the Times reported that Washington is considering forcing some migrant families to stay in Texas while they await the asylum process.

“This scam was attempted years ago and was shot down by a judge,” Abbott wrote a nightly post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “We will send Biden the same swift justice.”

The governor of Texas, a fierce critic of Biden’s border policies, has bused thousands of migrants to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and other blue cities since 2022. He promised in his post on X that he would “send more buses of migrants to Washington.” DC”

The Biden plan, which has not yet been finalized, would force certain migrant families to remain in Texas or possibly other border states by tracking their location through GPS monitoring devices, such as ankle bracelets.

But it was almost certain that it would always draw the wrath of not only immigrant advocates, but border state officials like Abbott.

Migrants and their supporters have already raised objections to the plan.

When people cross the border, their human rights come with them,” Marisa Limn Garza, head of the Las Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, said in a statement. Politicians like Abbott and Biden “cannot continue to play games with the lives of thousands of children and families,” she added. “Migrants are not hot potatoes.

Cruel asylum policies and treating people as burdens have human consequences.

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Most of the illegal migrants who have arrived in blue cities like LA and New York from Texas have not been bussed

their there

by Abbott; they paid their own way to cities where employment is plentiful and the policy climate makes it easier to travel the world without papers.

Punishing people who seek refuge violates refugee law and plays into the hands of perpetrators of fear mongering and invasion rhetoric that portray people seeking refuge as threats,” Eleanor Acer, director of refugee protection at Human Rights First, wrote on X.

But as Abbott alluded to in his post, the Biden administration’s plan is not without precedent.

In 1988, President Reagan’s administration forced thousands of migrants to remain in South Texas to await the asylum process. Migrants quickly set up camps in parking lots and abandoned buildings.

In January 1989, a federal judge ordered immigration officials to stop enforcing the policy while assessing whether they had the authority to enforce it, filtering the migrants to other parts of the country to pursue their asylum cases elsewhere.

But while the judge, Filemon B. Vela, temporarily barred immigration officials from detaining migrants in Texas in January, Abbott is mistaken about the ultimate outcome of the case.

In February 1989, after President George H. W. Bush came to power, Vela ruled in favor of the federal government, ruling that the government was within its power to keep migrants in South Texas while officials considered their applications for asylum.

By then, Bush administration officials had begun to change their strategy. Instead of allowing migrants to camp in South Texas towns while they waited, the government formally detained them. Single adults were held at the Port Isabel facility outside Brownsville, Texas. Families were held at a Red Cross shelter in Brownsville.

However, the Biden administration has pledged not to resume family detention, leaving the Bush-era strategy off the table, at least for now.