Texas Governor Greg Abbott scored a PR victory on Wednesday when the first bus filled with illegal aliens was dropped off a few blocks from the Capitol building in Union Station. The Biden administration had been unloading the illegal aliens without warning on small Texas towns, so Abbott graciously returned the favor.
Abbott also decided to play a little hardball of his own at the border by slowing truck traffic at several busy border crossings to a crawl simply by enforcing existing inspection procedures. What was once a 30-minute delay became a 12-hour ordeal for truckers, who began squealing almost immediately.
But Abbott is trying to make a deadly serious point. Once Title 42 pandemic restrictions are lifted, illegal border crossings are expected to jump to 240,000 a month. That’s a number that even scares Biden. It’s intolerable for Texas and other border states who have nowhere near the capacity to care for that tidal wave of humanity.
Biden, however, is more frightened of his supporters — radical left open-border advocates who have been agitating for the lifting of Title 42 since it was imposed by Donald Trump in March of 2020.
So Abbott has slowed commerce at the border to a snail’s pace, hoping to change the dynamic of the situation in his favor.
Abbott has been under enormous pressure from Democrats, Republicans, Mexicans, truckers, and corporations who are losing money while their goods sit in the Texas sun. On Wednesday, he relented slightly. He eased restrictions at the Laredo border crossing — the busiest in Texas.
The Mexican border state of Nuevo Leon agreed to increase inspections on their side of the border. Will other Mexican states follow suit?
“Since Nuevo Leon has increased its security on its side of the border, the Texas Department of Public Safety can return to its previous practice of random searches of vehicles crossing [the] bridge from Neuvo Leon,” Abbott said with the Nuevo Leon Gov. Samuel Alejandro García Sepulveda at his side.
Almost instantly, wait times plummeted for truckers trying to get across the Columbia-Solidarity Bridge in Laredo, which connects Nuevo Leon to Interstate 35 and is by far the busiest port in Texas for truck traffic coming from Mexico. More than 2.5 million trucks crossed into Laredo in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
One unexpected benefit of the increased inspections was that an estimated 25% of vehicles inspected crossing the border had serious mechanical issues, like bad brakes or tires.
Nonetheless, Abbott’s actions at the border were costing him a lot of goodwill.
Even Abbott’s biggest allies began to turn against his policy over the last few days. The Texas Trucking Association, which just two months ago endorsed his re-election, released a statement criticizing the policy.
“Unfortunately, this new initiative duplicates existing screening efforts and leads to significant congestion, delaying the products Americans rely on from our largest trading partner, Mexico,” TXTA President & CEO John D. Esparza said.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican, called the Abbott inspections “catastrophic.”
“This is not solving the border problem, it is increasing the cost of food and adding to supply chain shortages,” Miller said.
Abbott can’t solve the border problem. But Biden can. And if Abbott’s only play is to force a slowdown at the border that makes people squeal, he’ll take it.
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