State Sen. Dan Patrick, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, joined some of his conservative colleagues on Tuesday in calling for “immediate action” to address the surge of undocumented immigrants crossing into Texas.
“The Texas Department of Public Safety has indicated that sustained operations along our southern border will require $1.3 million per week,” Patrick said in a statement. “I am calling on the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House to immediately allocate $1.3 million a week in emergency spending for the rest of the year for added border security through Texas law enforcement.”
A call placed to the Legislative Budget Board about whether a special legislative session would be necessary to set aside such funding has not yet been returned. Patrick’s statement did not specifically say whether he supports calling a special session on border security, which some of his GOP colleagues have suggested.
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Last week Attorney General Greg Abbott, the state’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, wrote U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and asked for $30 million for a state-based border security initiative. The U.S. Border Patrol, he said, was overwhelmed by the influx of undocumented immigrants, including about 160,000 who have crossed into Texas in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector since October, including about 33,500 unaccompanied minors.
“With the Border Patrol’s focus shifted to this crisis, we have grave concerns that dangerous cartel activity, including narcotics smuggling and human trafficking, will go unchecked because Border Patrol resources are stretched too thin,” he wrote.
[Rep. Jonathan] Stickland said he and others would consider tapping into the state’s Rainy Day Fund for the state-based border security initiative if the federal government did not provide relief. Details of the plan would probably be debated should a special session be called, he added.
“This is a crisis situation depending on who you are talking to,” he said. “I haven’t heard any price tag — I have just heard people say this is a top priority. Depending on what we’re talking about, there are a number of different ideas. We need to start having these discussions and start figuring out what’s on the table.”
In a statement last week, state Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso, said more resources on the border won’t properly address the crisis on the border.
“What we are dealing with is an influx of children fleeing from Central American violence; imagine a situation so dire that you allow your children to travel a dangerous journey — thousands of miles — to a foreign land,” he said. “What is needed are not more “boots on the ground” or any other euphemisms for the militarization that both impacts border residents’ daily lives and is inadequate to deal with the specific issue at hand.”
I confess, I have not followed this particular issue closely. My longstanding opinion about border and immigration issues is that we have a supply and demand problem, in that vastly more people want to enter the US than we allow to enter by legal means, and just as having an excessively low speed limit on a stretch of otherwise open road leads to a lot of people speeding, having excessively stringent limits on legal immigration leads to a lot of people finding other ways in. If we had a system that was more realistic, more compassionate, and more flexible about the demand to immigrate, we’d have far, far fewer people trying to enter illegally. For that reason, I believe the people that insist we must “secure the border” as a precondition for doing anything else have it exactly backwards and are exacerbating the problem. Of course, I also believe that a lot of these “secure the border” people have no interest in solving the problem, but instead have an interest in exploiting it. That’s a whole ‘nother story, so let’s leave it at that.
Anyway, the immediate political issue appears to be resolved for now, so that will likely quiet the talk about a special session. If it does come up again, remember that Rick Perry – who has the sole discretion to call a special – will do what he thinks is best for Rick Perry. If he thinks it would be beneficial to his Presidential campaign (I still can’t say the words “Presidential campaign” in the context of Rick Perry with a straight face), then he’ll call it. If not, he won’t. He’ll take into account the wishes of his fellow Republicans, but his own needs come first. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Texpatriate, Stace, and Burka have more.