Over the weekend, the Dallas Morning-News, in collaboration with PolitiFact, debunked a viral video that appeared to capture President Joe Biden threatening to wage war with Texas.
"We're going to make sure those cowboys don't stop the surge of military-age men from entering," a voice sounding eerily like the president's said in the clip. "If we have to send F-15s to Texas and wage war against Texas, so be it."
The clip garnered hundreds of thousands of views. Despite its debunking, self-proclaimed patriots responding on X and TikTok said they're ready to defend Texas from Biden's authoritarian overreach.
The fake recording is making the rounds as Gov. Greg Abbott's standoff with Biden over whether the state or the federal government has immigration oversight comes to a deafening crescendo.
After months of falsely proclaiming that the White House maintains an "open borders" policy, Abbott ordered Texas National Guard troops to seize Eagle Pass's Shelby Park as part of Operation Lone Star, his border crackdown that Texas lawmakers have so far funded to the tune of $10 billion.
Officially, Abbott has said the seizure and the Guard's subsequent lockout of Customs and Border Protection agents is his attempt to thwart illegal crossings that the White House has no interest in stopping.
However, to many political observers it's just the latest spectacle executed by the grandstanding GOP governor. One executed with the hope that Biden responds by nationalizing the Texas National Guard — a move that would allow Republicans to paint him as a power-mad dictator.
"There would be individuals on both sides that would be very energized," St. Mary's Law professor and constitutional law expert Jeffrey Addicott said about the prospect of the White House taking control of the Guard. "With Biden running a reelection campaign, the optics would be bad. Texas is trying to secure the border, and you're trying to stop Texas from doing so; that's not a good message."
Biden's decision to federalize the Guard would also be subject to judicial review, and it would be a tough sell to the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, Addicott added.
Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson agreed, saying Biden is unlikely to take Abbott's bait, no matter how tense things get.
"Most people do not want to see the federal government nationalize the Texas National Guard as part of a conflict with the State of Texas and its governor, because that is potentially a clash of arms," Jillson said.
Instead, Jillson said Abbott's seizure of Shelby Park is part of a larger conservative agenda to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a 2012 ruling that said immigration-enforcement authority lies exclusively with the federal government.
Both scholars maintain that Abbott's Operation Lone Star and seizure of Shelby Park are little more than political theater — albeit with real-world consequences.
The Supreme Court
In 2012, Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070. Eerily similar to Texas' own Senate Bill 4, which Abbott signed into law last month, Arizona's so-called "Show Me Your Papers Law" allowed state and local authorities to arrest anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Additionally, Arizona's law allowed police to make such arrests without a warrant or probable cause.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 5-3 decision that Arizona's SB 1070 was unlawful and that immigration enforcement is the exclusive duty of the federal government.
"Abbott hopes they'll decide differently and say that states can protect their own borders," Jillson said. "But, I doubt that will happen, because immigration has historically been a federal issue, and while the Supreme Court has been willing to turn over longstanding precedents, I don't think they will allow [states] to control their own borders."
To the professor's point, the Supreme Court's ruled 5-4 Monday in a separate border fight between Texas and the U.S. government that federal agents are legally authorized to cut through concertina wire Abbott deployed along the Rio Grande.
Even so, Addicott believes both sides could muster solid arguments in front of the high court. It's possible the court's conservative supermajority, which voted to overturn Roe. v. Wade last year, could even come down in Abbott's favor.
Still, Addicott was light on details about what immigration enforcement would then look like.
"Those opinions are pretty narrow," Addicott said of the 2012 Arizona ruling. "The federal government has primary authority, which we all understand. But the real issue is, what if they're not doing their job?"
Indeed, Biden told a bipartisan group of mayors visiting the White House Friday that the U.S.-Mexico border hasn't been secure for the past decade. Immigration authorities encountered more than 225,000 migrants along the southern border last month, the highest such total recorded in the past 23 years.
However, Jillson and Addicott agreed that Operation Lone Star, while appealing to the governor's base, isn't doing anything to stanch that flow of migrants.
Grandstanding governor
Although Abbott's action in Eagle Pass attracted significant media attention, Jillson said it's done little to curb illegal immigration.
Shelby Park is not much more than a 47-acre green space located near an international border bridge that Border Patrol Agents previously used as a processing center for migrants.
Despite Abbott deploying buoys with chainsaw blades in the Rio Grande and concertina wire along its banks, the majority of Texas' 1,200-mile border with Mexico isn't rigorously patrolled by either the state or federal government. There's simply too much to cover.
Abbott's use of state funds to continue building former President Donald Trump's wall has so far yielded around 50 miles of barrier at a $1.5 billion cost to taxpayers, according to the Texas Tribune.
The hard truth is the nation's immigration system is broken and neither Republicans nor Democrats in Washington have so far shown an appetite to meet in the middle and work through a solution, Addicott said.
Meanwhile, the Eagle Pass pissing contest has real consequences.
During the standoff, three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned last week while trying to cross the Rio Grande into Texas. Federal officials, including U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said Border Patrol agents were unable to rescue the three because they were closed off from the park, a claim Abbott has denied.
Days later, another migrant's lifeless body was pulled from the Rio Grande near Shelby Park.
And the bodies could keep coming. Neither Jillson nor Adicott expects a Supreme Court ruling on the matter for at least a few months.
Subscribe to SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter| Or sign up for our RSS Feed
