Abbott Implies Harris Flop in Border Role
with Strange Summit Host City Shout Out

Capitol Inside
June 23, 2021

Governor Greg Abbott singled out the Texas border city of Del Rio on Wednesday as an example of the criminal infestation that he says Vice President Kamala Harris is causing along the Rio Grande through sustained neglect as the administration's point person on immigration.

Abbott issued the scathing appraisal after learning that Harris plans to visit El Paso on Friday in her first actual trip to the border since President Joe Biden selected her to oversee the federal response to a record migrant surge in recent months.

The governor also sought to steal the Democratic VP's thunder with an announcement several hours later on a town hall meeting that Abbott he plans to attend with Donald Trump on June 30 in the Texas border city of Edinburg. Trump contended on social media today that the White House wouldn't be dispatching Harris to the border if he and the Texas governor hadn't decided to go there first.

"After months of ignoring the crisis at the Southern Border, it is great that we got Kamala Harris to finally go and see the tremendous destruction and death that they’ve created—a direct result of Biden ending my very tough but fair Border policies,” Trump said in a post on GAB. “Harris and Biden were given the strongest Border in American history. And now, it is by far the worst in American history. If Governor Abbott and I weren’t going there next week, she would have never gone!”

Abbott has appeared to be patterning himself after Trump on immigration and other red meat issues that he plans to dribble out during a special session that's set to start on July 8. While Abbott and the ex-president haven't scheduled a stop in Del Rio or Val Verde County up to now, the governor will be able to fill Trump in the horror show there after meeting with local officials there earlier this month at an event that was billed as a summit on the border.

The timing of Abbott's dropping of Del Rio into the scorching assessment of the vice-president might not have been a coincidence in light of the U.S. Border Patrol's acknowledgement on Wednesday that 3,390 undocumented migrants had been apprehended since October in trains where they were hiding in storage compartments and other that have no air condition. That's nearly 10 times the number that had been discovered in train check operations during the same period the previous year.

Abbott has shown no concern for the damage that he could be doing the local economies in places on or near the U.S.-Mexico border with an escalation in claims that are dramatically inflated and flat out false in many cases.

"Vice President Harris is ignoring the real problem areas along our southern border that are not protected by the border wall and are being overrun by the federal government's ill-thought-out open border policies," Abbott said in an email this afternoon. "She will fail in her mission if she refuses to speak to residents of the Del Rio sector whose homes and ranches are being overrun by gangs and smugglers."

Abbott might have chosen Del Rio for the fact-finding mission this month as one of the only Texas border cities where he can get a relatively friendly audience. Del Rio is largest city in Val Verde County - one of the few Texas locations that the GOP flipped from blue to red last fall with Trump as the incumbent president. Democrats Beto O'Rourke and Hillary Clinton had received 52 percent and 51 percent of Val Verde vote in bids for U.S. Senate and president respectively in 2018 and 2016.

The number of migrants who'd been taken into custody in Texas by March had been up about 300 percent over the course of an entire year. Abbott tried to pin a massive amount of the blame on Harris in particular.

"The Vice President was named Border Czar over 90 days ago, and in that time Texans have had their homes broken into, property damaged, and guns pointed at their heads as cartels, smugglers, and human traffickers profit off the Biden Administration’s reckless open-border policies," Abbott asserted. ". I launched Operation Lone Star in March to combat this record-high influx of people and crime, and since then DPS has arrested over 1,700 criminals, apprehended over 41,000 migrants, and seized enough fentanyl to kill over 21 million people.

The governor had been mum on a record surge in illegal border crossings two years ago when Trump had been the president.