Greg Abbott Wants ‘Chaos’ at the Border: Texas Official

A city official in El Paso, Texas, believes that state Republicans are sowing chaos at the southern border for their own political gain.

David Stout, a county commissioner in El Paso’s Precinct 2 for almost 10 years, told Newsweek via phone that officials including Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton are using the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border to push an agenda.

The southern border has sparked political tensions on a national scale, as Abbott has received support from dozens of Republican counterparts who believe he and his state have the right to defend themselves from the migrant surge.

Illegal border encounters in the state have risen annually since 2021, prompting local and state Republicans to attempt to use their own laws to work around what they have described as the federal government’s inaction on border security.

Abbott and Paxton both received bad legal news this week. On Monday, a judge ruled that Paxton’s lawsuit against a nearly 50-year-old migrant shelter, Annunciation House, did not follow due process and must be litigated at the court level.

On Tuesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito delayed Texas’ implementation of its immigrant deportation laws related to Senate Bill 4—legislation that in effect would allow local and state law enforcement to arrest, detain and remove individuals suspected of entering the state illegally from other countries.

“Most actions that especially the Republican side of the aisle have taken recently—the rhetoric is politically charged,” Stout said. “They want to create chaos. They don’t want to see the issues that we’re facing here on the border. They want there to be chaos so that it will play into their rhetoric that there is chaos on the border.”

Newsweek reached out to Abbott and Paxton via email for comment.

Republicans in Texas are mimicking Republicans in Congress, Stout claimed, or vice versa, as part of “feeding their hands” through an “anti-immigrant push.”

Asked how he would refute the data and number of border crossings into his city and state, notably under the Biden administration, he said that Operation Lone Star has been in existence since 2021 and numbers continue to rise. Operation Lone Star is a joint operation between the Texas Department of Public Safety and the state military to curb illegal immigration along the southern border.

He questioned why the money from that operation, combined with funding provided by the federal government, has not alleviated a problem that officials have focused on at length.

“I think Governor Abbott has spent close to $10 [billion] or $11 billion on Operation Lone Star over the last number of years,” Stout said. “He talks about it every day. But that [money], in my opinion, has been a waste….They say that there’s an increasing number of migrant encounters and in 2022 you had the largest amount of migrant encounters. Well, Operation Lone Star has been around since before 2022.”

The federal government is at a political standstill following Senate Republicans’ rebuke of a $118 southern border bill claimed by advocates to be among the most comprehensive immigration reform in four decades. The bill included emergency powers for the federal government to deter migrants in large numbers and changes in asylum laws in addition to tens of billions in foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

El Paso has a long history as a welcoming place for immigrants, Stout added. He touted the continuous work done by volunteer organizations like Annunciation House, calling his fellow community members “so compassionate” that everyone steps up to the table to help others thrive.

“I think that it’s very discouraging for people in El Paso to continuously see our community put in a negative light, quite frankly—a light that’s not true,” he said. “The right saying the border is open is costly to a community like ours.

“We get questions from folks that are not from here, like, ‘Is it safe to walk out in the streets in El Paso? This is, I think, within the top three safest cities in the country with a population of over 500,000 for more than a decade. We’ve had to deal with this for a long time here in El Paso.”