The Texas attorney general toured the border around McAllen Wednesday with local, state and federal law enforcement. Ken Paxton says agencies are "limited by federal law and what the federal government are doing."
"I'm here to call attention to Texans and the American people that this is a problem," Paxton says. "The way we are dealing with it is not working. The very things that worked so well during the last few years that curtailed this have been totally taken away. Now, we're under tremendous pressure."
Customs and Border Protection says apprehensions increased 350% last month compared to March of 2020.
Paxton met with several county sheriffs. Lavaca County Sheriff Micah Harmon says his county, about 275 miles from the border, has a population of only about 20,000 people. He says the county had to respond to a crash recently involving a truck carrying up to 20 people.
"It depletes our resources. We had to deploy all our EMS people, our fire departments, all of our law enforcement," Harmon says. "It's a burden, and it's a strain on our community."
In Refugio County, north of Corpus Christi, Sheriff Pinky Gonzalez says his 13 deputies have spent 3,000 man-hours on cases dealing with immigration since January.
"We're a rural town. We've got a limited budget, and we're just overwhelmed with this," Gonzalez says. "We've just never seen anything like this."
Paxton says issues dealing with immigration spread beyond counties along the border.
"COVID is also being spread past Texas borders by the fact that they're here, and they're moving on to other places," he says. "We also just have the issues of drugs and human trafficking. That will affect the entire nation."
President Joe Biden has nominated Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez to lead Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Gonzalez, who is sheriff of the county surrounding Houston, ended a partnership with the federal government that authorized deputies to enforce federal immigration laws.
"I do not support ICE raids that threaten to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom do not represent a threat to the U.S. The focus should always be on clear & immediate safety threats. Not others who are not threats," Gonzalez wrote on Facebook in 2019.
The president had a bill introduced on his behalf in January that would provide an eight year path toward citizenship for the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally now. The measure would also include funding "for the Secretary of DHS to develop and implement a plan to deploy technology to expedite screening and enhance the ability to identify narcotics and other contraband at every land, air, and sea port of entry."
The measure would also increase punishments for people convicted of smuggling and human trafficking. The bill would also include $4 billion to "address the underlying causes of migration," including additional assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, "conditioned on their ability to reduce the endemic corruption, violence, and poverty that causes people to flee their home countries."
