Texas’ Abbott tears into federal official for saying climate change leads to border crossings

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott took a clumsy swing at U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday, blasting the White House official as “pathetic” for blaming the migrant surge, at least in part, on climate change.

Abbott’s insulting tweet came shortly after Mayorkas lambasted the Republican governor’s border policies during an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. During the appearance, the secretary said global factors, not lax federal enforcement, prompted the current historic high in border crossings.

“We have the effects of climate change, poverty, increasing levels of authoritarianism,” Mayorkas said. “There are very many challenges that are at the root cause of the displacement of people around the world.”

Mayorkas was also critical of Abbott’s border policies, specifically the governor’s busing and flying of migrants to Democrat-led cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

“We have one governor in the state of Texas who is refusing to cooperate with other governors and other local officials,” Mayorkas said during the interview. “And it is a remarkable failure of governance to refuse to cooperate with one’s fellow local and state officials.”

Abbott’s response came swiftly on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. 
“Climate change? Mayorkas is pathetic,” Abbott tweeted. “The REAL reason illegal immigration records are being set is because Biden refuses to enforce immigration laws. We will send more buses and planes. We will continue building the razor wire walls that Biden wants to tear down.”

Federal agents encountered 302,000 migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in December, an all-time high, according to ABC News. Although it’s not immediately clear how many migrated to the U.S. as a direct result of climate change, climate-related migration is a real issue, experts maintain.

The destruction caused by hurricanes Eta and Iota in November 2020 displaced 1.7 million people, especially in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration. Many of those displaced people headed to the U.S.-Mexico border.

What’s more, higher-than-normal temperatures in Central America between 2018 and 2021 quadrupled the region’s number of people experiencing hunger to 8 million, according to a Council of Foreign Relations report.

“Barring massive shifts in policy and human behavior around the world, environmental degradation due to climate change will fuel volatility in Central America for decades to come, with disruptive spillover effects for neighboring Mexico and the United States,” the report reads. “Halting the flow of people northward from Central America is neither feasible nor desirable, especially given the growing labor demands in the United States and Mexico.”

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This article appears in Dec 27, 2023 – Jan 9, 2024.