Texas Governor Greg Abbott, along with the Department of Public Security (DPS), launched ‘Operation Lone Star’ on Saturday, a program that will work to combat the smuggling of drugs and people across the southern border.
The program will send police and resources to “high-threat areas” along the border “to deny Mexican cartels and other smugglers the ability to transport drugs and people to Texas.”
“The crisis on our southern border continues to escalate because of the Biden government’s policies that refuse to protect the border and invite illegal immigration,” Abbott said in a statement. “Texas supports legal immigration, but will not be complicit in open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans.”
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The Texas National Guard and the DPS will work together on the new program.
Abbott’s announcement came days after a skirmish between the Republican governor of Texas and President Biden at the border. “The Biden government must stop importing COVID into our country,” Abbott told CNBC on Thursday. More than 100 illegal immigrants released to the US tested positive for Covid-19 this week.
“This is a Neanderthal approach to dealing with the COVID situation,” said Abott, using words the president used the day before against him. Biden called Abbott’s decision to remove the state’s mask mandates from “Neanderthal thinking”.
Meanwhile, the Biden government is facing a dramatic increase in unaccompanied children at the border, a sign of how resources have been overburdened just months after the new government.
Axios reports that in the week ending March 1, the Border Patrol sent an average of 321 minors a day to Health and Human Services (HHS). It is a dramatic increase of 47 in early January and an average of 203 in early February, the channel reported.
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Department of Health and Human Services officials project that 117,000 children will arrive at the border unaccompanied this year.
The Biden administration terminated the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), ended the construction of the border wall, and restarted the process of catching and releasing – whereby migrants are released into the interior of the United States. This practice was terminated by the Trump administration in 2019.
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It maintained Title 42 protections – which allow migrants to be reversed quickly due to the coronavirus pandemic – but so far has not sought to apply them to unaccompanied children.
Adam Shaw of Fox News contributed to this report.