According to a statement released by the Republican Party of Texas today, Texas leaders including Gov. Rick Perry, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and state House Speaker Joe Strauss have “directed the Texas Dept. of Public Safety (DPS) to immediately begin law enforcement surge operations on the Texas-Mexico border” because of the “absense of adequate federal resources to secure the border.
The operations will cost Texans $1.3 million per week.
“Texas can’t afford to wait for Washington to act on this crisis and we will not sit idly by while the safety and security of our citizens are threatened,” Gov. Perry says in the statement. “Until the federal government recognizes the danger it’s putting our citizens in by its inaction to secure the border, Texas law enforcement must do everything they can to keep our citizens and communities safe.”
The officials have sent an official letter to DPS Director Steve McCraw, authorizing DPS to conduct law enforcement surge operations using “any funds appropriate to the agency.” The surge operations will continue through the end of the calendar year, according to the joint statement.
Texans are noticing more visible police presence all over the state, and more traffic stops of large vehicles capable of carrying large numbers of people that are traveling northward from the border region, as the state copes with the massive influx of illegal aliens. Gov. Perry has complained that with the federal government failing to stop the flow, and then moving the illegal aliens to hotels around Texas, there are no rooms left for Texans with the summer vacation season here.
According to the Texas Republican statement, Border Patrol has apprehended more illegal aliens in the first eight months of this fiscal year than it apprehended all of last fiscal year — 160,000 this year, versus 154,000 all of last year. An estimated 34,000 unaccompanied alien children have been apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley this year, and estimates peg the year’s total at 90,000.
The Obama administration is using military bases to house some of the illegal aliens, and has shipped some of them as far north as New York and Massachusetts.
Update: The situation is so bad that frustrated Border Patrol agents are starting to just give up and look for other jobs. That’s quite a decision to make in this jobless economy.
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