Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) on Sunday handed President Biden a letter in which he criticized the president’s visit to the southern border town of El Paso.
The governor was greeting Biden on the tarmac when he handed him the letter, which began with Abbott writing: “Your visit to our southern border with Mexico today is $20 billion too little and two years too late.”
“Moreover, your visit avoids the sites where mass illegal immigration occurs and sidesteps the thousands of angry Texas property owners who lives have been destroyed by your border policies,” the letter read.
Abbott claimed in the letter that downtown El Paso had been “sanitized of the migrant camps” that he said had overrun the city in an attempt by the administration to “shield” Biden from “the chaos that Texans experience on a daily basis.”
“This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted,” Abbott wrote.
The governor, who has consistently criticized the Biden administration for the migration crisis, accused the president again in the letter for emboldening drug cartels that are bringing fentanyl across the border, an issue consistently brought up by Republicans when criticizing border policies.
Abbott lays out five policy areas he wants Biden to address that include complying with the statues mandating that “various categories of aliens ‘shall’ be detained” to stop “unlawfully paroling aliens en masse,” and to fully enforce Title 42, the Trump-era policy that allows for migrants to be quickly expelled at the border without asylum processing.
Abbott also suggested taking steps to prosecute illegal entry between ports and allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to remove immigrants in the country illegally, immediately resuming construction of the border wall in Texas, and designate Mexican drug cartels “as foreign terrorist organizations.”
“When you finish the photo-ops in a carefully stage-managed version of El Paso, you have a job to do,” Abbott wrote before listing the criteria.
Abbott in the letter also praised former President Trump’s border policies that he said resulted in “historically low levels of illegal immigration.”
The Texas Republican has himself been criticized by Democrats for sending buses of migrants from Texas to various Democratic cities, including a bus of more than 100 migrants sent to Washington, D.C., on a frigid Christmas Eve.
Earlier on Sunday, Abbott criticized the administration over not communicating with local officials about the president’s trip to the border until the night before. Sunday is Biden’s first trip to the southern border since taking office.