Texas Gov. Abbott: Biden Sending Too Few Soldiers, Too Late

President Joe Biden’s decision to send 1,500 active-duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border will do nothing to secure it because of the harm his policies have created, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Sunday. 

“President [Donald] Trump sent soldiers to the border to secure the border,” Abbott said on “Fox News Sunday.” “President Biden is sending 1,500 soldiers to do paperwork. That is not going to secure the border. We need 15,000 or 150,000 to secure the border because of the open border policies of the Biden administration.”

Biden said last week he would send 1,500 soldiers to the border to perform warehouse support, data entry services, and administrative tasks, freeing the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to focus on fieldwork with the anticipated surge that could come next week with the ending of the Trump-era Title 42 immigration policy. 

“This is a day late and tens of thousands of soldiers too few,” Abbott said. 

He also defended his decision to bus immigrants to sanctuary cities such as New York City and Chicago, after the White House last week said that the move is making it more difficult to remove people who don’t have a lawful basis to stay in the United States. 

“The reason we are busing those migrants across the country is because small little towns on the border have no capacity to deal with the number of people coming across the border and we have to relieve the congestion in those small communities and bus them to larger communities,’ Abbott said, calling Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas a liar for his comments on the border. 

“He says the border is closed,” said Abbott. “Everybody in America knows that the border is not closed and it is more open. He said this is an issue that we’ve been grappling with for years…that’s incorrect because the fact is three years ago we had the fewest border crossings in decades because the federal government under President Trump was able to put into place very easy policies such as the remain in Mexico policy and the Title 42 policy.” 

Trump also ended catch and release and worked to build a border wall, while sending the message that the border was closed, said Abbott. 

“That is why we have the fewest border crossings in decades,” he added. “Only when Biden came in and eliminated all those policies and put down the welcome mat to the entire world that the border is now open, that we suddenly have the chaos that was caused solely by policies put into place by Joe Biden.”