A week ago, on April 7, we discussed the updates to Texas’s “Operation Lone Star,” the policies enacted by Gov. Greg Abbott to protest Washington’s plan to abandon Title 42, to mitigate the entry of illegal migrants into that state, and to put a stop to the federal government’s dumping of illegals onto Texas towns and communities.
One such policy was the transfer of migrants out of state by bus to Washington, DC. That policy has begun to be implemented, the first busload arriving near the U.S. Capitol yesterday morning. Fox News is reporting currently that a second bus, with migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Colombia aboard, arrived at the same spot just hours ago. Though dismissed by the White House as a “publicity stunt,” the policy appears to already be working. Many of the communities that had originally asked Abbott for help say the federal government has stopped dropping immigrants in their towns.
And what of another of Operation Lone Star’s upgrades, namely the enhanced safety inspections at vehicular points of entry? That practice, which immediately resulted in dramatic slowdowns of commercial traffic entering Texas from Mexico, is intended to convince Mexico’s government to beef up its own border control measures. After one week, it appears to have had some small success as well. The governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon, which shares a short, nine-mile-long border with Texas, agreed to pre-inspect cargo trucks heading into the United States before they reach the border. In return, Gov. Abbott said traffic across the single bridge connecting the two states would return to normal immediately.
According to the NY Post:
Today’s deal does not apply to the rest of the Texas-Mexico border, which is 1,241 miles long and borders the Mexicans states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas. Abbott said he was willing to make similar deals with governors from other Mexican states if they were willing to beef up border security as well.
Such measures by individual U.S. states cannot have the overall effectiveness that a determined effort to enforce the law by Washington would have, but Texas and Gov. Abbott are at least making an effort. Until and if sanity returns to the federal government, that’s all we have.
For more, see the NY Post.