Judging by President Biden’s underwater approval rating in the state, Texans are fed up with the utter state of anarchy at the U.S.-Mexico border, and two Texas congressmen are acting on it.
Reps. Pat Fallon and August Pfluger, both Republicans, proposed a bill on Tuesday known as the Lone Star Reimbursement Act, aimed at reimbursing Texas for money the state has spent on the border, to the tune of about $1.5 billion.
“[T]he federal government has abdicated responsibility to secure the border, so Texas has stepped up,” Fallon told Fox News in an interview on Thursday. “I spent eight years in the Texas legislature, and where the federal government lacked and let the Mexican drug cartels run wild, the state of Texas filled that gap. And it cost $1.4 billion. So Texas shouldn't be disproportionately punished because Joe Biden has made every state a border state.”
In the same interview, Pfluger joined Fallon to elaborate on where these funds would be directed:
Governor Abbott has sent Texas national guardsmen down there, and all in all, their encounters and rejections and apprehensions have totaled 200 thousand illegal immigrants. So the $1.4 billion would reimburse their expenses, their lodging, their operations, I mean, everything it takes for them to deploy down to the southern border, and do something that is not their primary duty. But let's be clear: this is not going to fix the issue. The Biden administration has to do it. They don't have the political will.
In their bill, the congressmen refer to Operation Lone Star, a law signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) to enforce immigration law on Texas’s shared border with Mexico. According to the two congressmen, 134,000 illegal migrants have been apprehended as a result of the operation, and a further 16,700 illegal migrants have been denied entry.
Related: May Marked a Record-Smashing Month For Illegal Border Crossings
Though the bill is unlikely to pass under a Democrat-controlled Congress, it does make a powerful statement about the level of malfeasance Biden and his administration have acted with at the Southern border.