AUSTIN, Texas – Karla Marquez traveled through 13 countries to reach Texas from Venezuela. She described how hard it was to get to El Paso.
“We didn’t come here to stay. We came here to look for a better future,” Marquez said. “We came here to work, to fight for our dream. A dream we didn’t even want to accomplish here.”
Due to the influx of migrants in El Paso, the city extended its disaster declaration until Jan. 17. State lawmakers are also looking at ways to address the crisis along the border.
Gov. Greg Abbott has spent more than $4 billion tax dollars on Operation Lone Star, a program created to increase security along the Texas-Mexico border. But it hasn’t stopped migrants from crossing it.
“We've been spending billions of dollars without any kind of accountability. And without any kind of positive results,” said Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso.
During the upcoming legislative session, Blanco said tax dollars should be put towards humanitarian aid like food, shelter and medicine instead of Operation Lone Star.
“We are going to approach this as a humanitarian crisis and helping people that are in need regardless of where they come from,” Blanco said. “That's who El Paso is. That's who we are as a community. But we do need the assistance. And I think both the federal government as well as the state can step up and provide some of that humanitarian support.”
He added that there are also smart technologies that could be used to track migration.
“Drones, cameras, sensors, X-ray, radiation machines,” Blanco said. “A variety of technologies can be utilized, rather than a boots-on-the-ground approach that I think would be better utilized and smarter than what we're doing right now. The deployment of boots on the ground clearly is not working.”
But Gov. Abbott vows to keep funding Operation Lone Star, citing a lack of leadership on the issue from President Biden. The president will visit El Paso for the first time this Sunday. His visit comes after immigration agents encountered a record-breaking 2.7 million migrants at the southern border in the last fiscal year. Texas Republicans have repeatedly bashed Biden for not making a trip to the border yet.
In an Oct. 2022 interview with Capital Tonight’s Karina Kling, Gov. Abbot said, “We wouldn’t have to be doing this if it were not for the fact that Joe Biden has eliminated any border enforcement whatsoever.”
Nathan Jones with Sam Houston State University said the federal government needs to appoint immigration judges, help with political asylum processing and build facilities to deal with the flow of migrants.
“That's one place where the governor is absolutely right,” said Nathan Jones, an associate professor of security studies at Sam Houston State University. “This is a federal policy level issue that is supposed to be being dealt with at the federal policy level.”
As long as Biden is president, Mark Jones of Rice University said the governor will keep spending billions on border security, instead of humanitarian aid.
“I don't see the governor or Texas Republican lawmakers supporting anything that would encourage undocumented immigrants to come to Texas and stay in Texas,” he said. “If anything, they want to make conditions here such that those immigrants, if they do cross the border, are going to want to continue on to places like New York, California, Illinois, or Washington, DC.”