A new Texas law is attracting armed groups with body armor, long guns and high tech drones to the border.
Some local officials are welcoming them, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The new law allows migrants to be arrested for trespassing. The armed groups intend to find the illegals and deliver them to law enforcement officials for arrest.
The Kinney County sheriff has been working with these groups for months. Former Border Patrol Agent Brad Coe has been on the lookout for help in deterring illegal immigration. “The whole premise is if [migrants] know they’ll be arrested, they’ll go somewhere else,” Coe said.
Not everybody is happy with the idea of private citizens working with local authorities to stem the tide of illegal immigrants streaming across the southern border.
A slew of organizations, including the ACLU, filed a complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice over the matter. They are requesting that the DOJ scrutinize Texas state agencies and local governments that are involved in the effort to arrest illegal immigrants.
They don’t like the fact that Kinney County officials have either welcomed the groups or offered their tacit support. Kinney County has also looked into working with private security companies to deal with the overwhelming problem of illegal immigration Texas has been dealing with month after month.
In an October interview with Guy Benson, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, “The Biden administration continues to ignore the border, continue to promote these open border policies that are a complete disaster [and] is one of the reasons why even the Democrats disagree with Biden on his border policy and independents and Republicans view what Biden is doing is completely a catastrophe.”
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Texas Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn sent a letter to President Biden supporting Gov. Greg Abbott’s disaster declaration concerning the border.
“In the last eight months alone,” wrote the senators, “over a million individuals crossed illegally into the United States, which is now on pace for over 2 million illegal crossings for 2021.”
In one example, Del Rio, Texas, saw more than 1,000 illegal immigrants crossing the border per day.
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It’s hasn’t gotten any better.
According to the New York Post, U.S. Border agents alone apprehended more than 173,000 illegal immigrants at the southern border in November. After a three month decline, that’s an an increase of more than 5 percent. The number doesn’t take into account the illegals who avoided authorities altogether.
If the federal government won’t help, what are Texans to do?
It boils down to a state’s right to defend itself from intruders. And it’s nothing new.
Mike Vickers, chairman of the Texas Border Volunteers, pointed out that Texans have been defending the border since 1823, the year the Texas Rangers was instituted to protect Texas settlers and their land. “We’re still dealing with the bad guys from Mexico,” Vickers told the New York Post. “This is a war,” Vickers stated, talking about smugglers who traffic in drugs and migrants.
Self-defense is a sacred right. It applies to states as well as individuals. In the highly publicized trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, the defendant was found not guilty by means of self-defense for shooting three men, two of them fatally. Rittenhouse was patrolling the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, to protect people and their property and to offer medical assistance to those who needed it during the riots of August 2020.
Why was Rittenhouse on the streets of Kenosha that night? Because law enforcement officials were in short supply.
Texas has the Constitutional right to protect its borders from invasion, as outlined by Kinney County attorney Brent Smith in an article for The Center Square. The federal government has a Constitutional obligation to help Texas. It is not a voluntary. Still, Biden fails to act in any decisive manner to the border crisis.
The feds aren’t holding up their end of the deal, so Texans are doing what they have to do to protect their state and their citizens.
It is a dangerous move, but what other choice do they have?
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
