Texas’ governor-elect, Attorney General Greg Abbott, laid out his border security strategy on Fox News’ “The Kelly File” over the weekend. Abbott told host Martha MacCallum that if President Obama uses executive action on amnesty, it will result in the State of Texas launching a lawsuit against him.
“People are sick and tired of the president using executive orders to dictate a pathway inconsistent with Americans values,” Abbott said. “If he crosses the line he will see an overall rejection. And if he does, we will be involved in another lawsuit against him.”
Since Obama became president, the State of Texas has filed 27 lawsuits against the federal government.
Abbott warned that the immigration crisis is far from over, and that if Obama takes executive action on amnesty another spike in illegal crossers at the Texas-Mexico border is likely.
“We are concerned there will be another surge of border activity, in part because of action that the president may take,” Abbott said. “But remember this: the border surge that all the cameras showed earlier this year is nothing new in the State of Texas. We have had people crossing the border for years. We have been involved in these sporadic surge operations by the Texas Department of Public Safety to staunch the flow of cross-border activity.”
He said that the federal government must “not to open the floodgates of the border” and not hold the State of Texas accountable for the many costs accrued during crossing surges.
When asked if he is sympathetic to Hispanic families living in the U.S., Abbott replied, “We share the sympathies. My family is multi-cultural — my wife is Hispanic….We found Hispanics agree with the Republican view of securing the border; I got more than 50 percent of the male Hispanic vote [and] about 44 percent of the overall Hispanic vote. This is an issue that really resonates across the State of Texas. We embrace and support legal immigration in this country, but everyone wants to assure that the broken immigration system caused by Washington, D.C. gets fixed.”
In Abbott’s view, the border must be secured immediately in order to find middle ground with the president.
“The first step is to secure the border,” he said. “As long as we have an open border, as long as the immigration laws are not enforced, as long as the president is inviting people to come here illegally, we will never see a secure border. So we must start with securing the border.”
Follow Kristin on Twitter @KristinBTate.
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