Global Courant
Governor Greg Abbott announced that a water barrier of buoys will be used to secure the Texas border.
Governor Greg Abbott announced that a water barrier of buoys will be used to secure the Texas border.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced Thursday that Texas will immediately begin securing its border with Mexico with a “water-based barrier” of buoys in the Rio Grande.
“We are securing the border at the border,” the Republican governor said at a news conference on Thursday. “What we can do with these cuffs is prevent people from even reaching the border.”
Abbott said the Texas legislature allocated $5.1 billion to secure the border and that Steve McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, and Thomas Suelzer, a general in the National Guard, “came together to apply this strategy to fit.”
“Today, the Mexican cartels are public enemy number one,” McCraw said at the news conference. “The most powerful and most ruthless and violent criminal organization in the world right now. They impact every community in Texas.”
McCraw said the first 300 meters of buoys will be placed along the river at Eagle Pass, which borders Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico.
McCraw said “no one” should attempt to enter the US between the entry gates, calling it “dangerous” and a risk to migrants’ lives.
“We don’t want anyone to get hurt,” he said. “In fact, we want to prevent people from getting hurt, prevent people from drowning.”
David Donatti, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said in a statement to HuffPost that the shackles won’t actually address anything.
“The chain of buoys along the Rio Grande is just the latest in a chain of gifts from the state to private contractors to fuel the crisis at the border caused by the governor,” he said. “The floating balls don’t address the real and important reasons people come to the United States. The shackles are a plague on the moral conscience of Texas.”
Neither Abbott nor DPS immediately responded to requests for comment.
At the start of the press conference, before several bills on securing the border were signed into law, Abbott said the federal government had failed to secure Texas’s border with Mexico.
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“As a result, Texas has had to take unprecedented measures to respond to the crisis caused by the Biden administration on the border. And in response, the Texas legislature has stepped up a notch to ensure we can respond more forcefully.
