BELTON, Texas — “What I’d like to see is for the federal government to do their job and to stop the migration from coming across and help the State of Texas and other states that are helping Texas stop the illegal migration coming across the border,” state Representative Hugh Shine said.
State lawmakers tell me that there has been a large increase of immigration in Texas and that the federal government has done little to help combat the problem.
“They have to be fed, they have to be clothed, they have to be educated. Who pays for that? We do. Why should we pay for illegal immigration,” state Senator Pete Flores
said.
Border prosecutor Nelson Barnes said in the last two years more than 18,000 smugglers have been arrested in Edwards County.
“One of which is a smuggling issue because we have so many smuggling cases. There’s thousands of smuggling cases pending in the border county which have led to public safety concerns because many of those then involve an arrest or high speed chase, we’ve had multiple fatalities because of that,” Barnes said.
Last week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government has the authority to remove the razor wire Texas installed at the southern border.
“The bottom line is we need to stop the migration from coming across. We need to stop the drug traffic, we need to stop the sexual transmission of people coming across and we need to also make sure we keep the cartel out of Texas,” Rep. Shine said.
I asked our state representatives for their solutions.
“Joe Biden out of office,” Sen. Flores said.
Legal challenges between Texas and the federal government have been going on for years but intensified when President Biden first took office in 2021.
