Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott shot down claims by ABC News’ Martha Raddatz that it is in fact Republicans who are to blame for President Joe Biden’s border crisis.
Raddatz told Abbott that it’s the GOP that talks about the border wall and open borders. She related that she has never heard the president say, “We have an open border, come on over.”
Instead, she criticized Abbott along with former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for pointing out the obvious. Raddatz lectured that the “message reverberates in Mexico and beyond.”
Due to Republican criticisms, she claimed, smugglers are able to take advantage of those statements. Abbott, to his credit, was having none of this reasoning.
Raddatz sounded strikingly similar to Karine Jean-Pierre: “The border… is not open…anyone who suggests otherwise is simply doing the work of these smugglers who, again, are spreading misinformation which is very dangerous.”https://t.co/yFYaNMVHMc
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) December 20, 2022
Instead, he told the host that from the day Biden was elected, it was well-known that he supported open borders. Cartels knew this, he said, and they also knew “whether the Biden administration (was) going to enforce the immigration laws or not.”
This knowledge, he asserted, is spread around the world but “most importantly” implemented by drug cartels and human traffickers.
Raddatz did not give up in her attempts to blame Republicans for the Democratic crisis. She then asked the Texas governor, “And how do you play into that” and what he could do better.
This question, of course, was addressed to the man who is virtually single-handedly doing more to stymie illegal immigration than anyone else in the nation.
Abbott simply replied that Texas has “every level of government doing everything we can” to stop illegal immigration. These efforts include “repelling them or arresting them and putting them behind bars.”
Abbott famously spearheaded the movement to ship illegal migrants to so-called “sanctuary cities.” He put pressure on parts of the country that speak loudly but bear no consequences for Washington’s blind eye towards the border crisis.
He also used vast amounts of state resources to address what is constitutionally a federal responsibility. And for this, he gets called out on ABC News.
Brett Baker, vice president of research and publications for Media Research Center, in turn, called out Raddatz for her “ludicrous” line of reasoning. Baker retorted that Biden’s policies “speak louder than any words he may not have explicitly said.”
Using that reasoning, he said, is akin to accusing journalists of promoting Trump’s policies while they loudly denounced them.
The left is desperate to assign blame for the administration’s massive border failures anywhere but where it obviously belongs. Accusing the victim is a tired and weak strategy, and Texas is the primary victim of the White House’s open border policies.
