We reported yesterday that the Department of Homeland Security has ordered the State of Texas to stand down on its takeover of Gen. J.O. Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas. In a letter dated January 10, General Counsel Jonathan Meyer of the DHS wrote to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton demanding that the Texas Military Department surrender the park to the Border Patrol by the close of business yesterday, January 17. As part of his argument, Meyer implied that Texas authorities had prevented federal officials from rescuing an illegal migrant family who drowned in the Rio Grande the day after the park’s seizure. In actual fact, the migrants had already died when the CBP was turned away at the park entrance.
Texas stood its ground. In a letter dated yesterday, AG Paxton denied that rescue efforts of the migrants had been impeded and declared that the park was open to federal rescuers. He concluded with his own charge:
President Biden has been warned in a series of letters, one of them hand-delivered to him in El Paso, that his sustained dereliction of duty in securing the border is illegal. By instructing your agency and others to ignore federal immigration laws, he has breached the guarantee, found in Article IV, § 4 of the U.S. Constitution, that the federal government “shall protect each of [the States] against Invasion.”
Breitbart’s Randy Clark, a veteran Border Patrol agent, writes that the Texas seizure of the park has brought the incursion of migrants down to a relative trickle: While migrant apprehensions in Eagle Pass were averaging more than 2,000 per day in late December, they have now dropped to around 500 per day.
For more, see Breitbart News.