For perhaps the first time in eight years, Donald Trump is not the face of the far right’s anti-immigration fixation. In his stead sits Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas who appears hell-bent on inducing a constitutional crisis by defying the federal government on two fronts. He has deployed the state’s military assets to block federal law enforcement officials from accessing parts of the US-Mexico border and vowed to keep up the razor wire along the Rio Grande despite the Supreme Court holding that the Biden administration is authorized to remove the fortifications.
On Wednesday, Abbott invoked a dubious constitutional argument, claiming his state has a “right of self-defense” that supersedes “any federal statutes to the contrary.” Abbott’s attorney general went so far as to falsely argue that Biden is “literally in partnership with these cartels” supposedly invading Texas. All but one of the other 26 Republican governors have sided with Abbott, effectively making him the champion of an animating issue for conservatives. “Texas is upholding the law while Biden is flouting it,” Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and thwarted Trump rival, declared in a statement of solidarity. “Florida will keep assisting Texas with personnel and assets.”
Trump attempted to recapture the spotlight by issuing a somewhat belated appeal on Thursday. “Texas has rightly invoked the Invasion Clause of the Constitution, and must be given full support to repel the Invasion,” he wrote. “We encourage all willing States to deploy their guards to Texas to prevent the entry of Illegals, and to remove them back across the Border.”
In Washington, meanwhile, Trump is making his presence felt by attempting to torpedo a border policy compromise that congressional Republicans have spent weeks hashing out with Senate Democrats and the White House. The deal would grant Republicans an unspecified set of stricter immigration policies in exchange for another military aid package for Ukraine. However, the former president is pressuring Republicans to oppose the negotiations—the calculation being that any bipartisan progress on immigration would help Biden in November, while continued dysfunction at the border would have the opposite effect. This has greatly angered some Senate Republicans, a relatively moderate bunch compared to their House cohort. “That [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling,” Mitt Romney, the junior Republican senator from Utah, told CNN.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, on the other hand, seems receptive to Trump’s wishes. He said in a Friday letter to House Republicans that “if rumors about the contents of the [Senate’s] draft proposal are true, it would have been dead on arrival in the House” before vowing to antagonize the Biden administration further. “When we return next week, by necessity, the House Homeland Security Committee will move forward with Articles of Impeachment against [Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas],” Johnson wrote. “A vote on the floor will be held as soon as possible.” Impeaching Mayorkas over the influx of migrants entering the US has long been a priority of Washington’s more Trump-inclined members. In 2022, Kevin McCarthy virtually started his campaign for the speakership by threatening to do exactly that. But McCarthy never followed through and was ultimately ousted in a far-right coup spurred by Trump. His replacement, the more militant Johnson, is now providing Trump and his allies with much of what they want, lest he suffer the same fate as his predecessor.
