HOUSTON — Texas Governor Greg Abbott said on Wednesday that days of grueling traffic at the border, triggered by new security inspections he ordered last week, were part of a concerted effort to force Mexican officials to do more to halt the flow of migrants into the United States.
Abbott raised the stakes in a clash over immigration that has confused trade routes to Texas, saying he would end inspections at only one entry point — the bridge between Laredo and the Mexican city of Colombia, Nuevo León — and only because the governor of that area state had agreed to increase border security on the Mexican side.
Texas Police Department, said Mr. Abbott, would continue to hold back all trucks coming from other Mexican states for safety inspections, despite mounting pressure from truck drivers, business groups and officials from both sides calling for an end to delays that have occurred for years. hours and even days and very limited commercial traffic.
“Clogged bridges can only end with the kind of collaboration we’re demonstrating today between Texas and Nuevo León,” said Mr. Abbott, a two-term Republican who will be re-elected this year.
The announcement marked a shift in Mr Abbott’s public description of the security inspections he ordered last week, acknowledging that they were a means of exerting political pressure on both Mexican officials and President Biden.
“The goal has always been to make sure people understand the implications of an open border and that Texas won’t tolerate it anymore,” Abbott said.
In a statement on Wednesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki called the inspections “unnecessary and redundant” and said that “the continuous flow of legitimate trade and travel and CBP’s ability to do its job should not be hindered.” “, referring to blockades at customs and border security facilities. Texas state police have established their vehicle security checkpoints just past where trucks go through federal inspection, making the backups. Ms. Psaki said commercial traffic was down by as much as 60 percent.
The Mexican State Department said in a statement that it opposed Mr Abbott’s actions and that Mexican officials had been in contact with Mr Abbott and federal officials to “find alternatives that would ensure the security of our common border without harm binational trade. †
The security checks have been applied to all commercial vehicles entering Texas at major commercial crossings, and in the days since they began, the number of backups at the border has increased significantly.
Companies complain that they can’t get goods in Texas. Mexican truck drivers, who had been delayed all day in sweltering heat with no food or bathrooms, began protesting, blocking intersections in the cities of Pharr and El Paso from Monday to Tuesday.
Even some Republican politicians, such as conservative Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, urged Abbott to end the inspections, saying they were “increasing the cost of food and widening supply chain shortages.”
And so, Mr. Abbott appeared in the border town of Laredo on Wednesday with the governor of the Mexican state of Nuevo León, Samuel Alejandro García Sepúlveda, and said Texas would end security checks for trucks entering Laredo, a crossing that serves a relatively limited portion of the border. “The Texas Department of Public Safety may revert to its previous policy” of random checks at that intersection, Mr Abbott said.
Mr. García said in return, officials in his state had set up a number of checkpoints on the Mexican side of the border crossing and promised that “our 14-kilometer border with Texas will be continuously patrolled with our police.” (The Texas-Mexico border is 1,254 miles, or more than 2,000 kilometers.)
Presenting the decision as a victory, Mr Abbott suggested he could have reached an agreement with Mexican leaders in one state on border security, and promised to do the same with others.
But that target was never mentioned in Mr Abbott’s rollout of the inspections last week. Instead, he had said the inspections were part of a broad response to the Biden administration’s announcement that it would end a Trump-era policy of returning most migrants at the border under an emergency rule. for public health, known as Title 42.
Abbott on Wednesday urged Biden to enforce the public health policy, which is expected to end next month.
Another part of Abbott’s effort to put pressure on the Biden administration, also announced last week, was to charter buses to take migrants released from federal custody to Texas and to Washington or other locations outside the United States. to bring the state. The migrants went on a voluntary basis, state officials said.
The first of the buses arrived in Washington on Wednesday, Mr Abbott said in a statement, carrying two dozen migrants from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. A second was on the way.
A Fox News camera crew attended the arrival of the first bus and captured images of the migrants as they emerged from the Capitol, wearing masks and packing envelopes from Manila.
Abbott and his political strategists have seen the border and opposition to the Biden administration’s immigration policies as a winning issue among voters, including many Democrats in Texas.
But the backups caused by the inspections, which industry experts said hit tens of millions of dollars in product shipments alone, provided a rare opening for Democrats to use the border against Abbott.
“It’s the wrong response to the Title 42 problem,” said Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district includes Laredo. “All he has done is slow down the national supply chain. He affects a lot of income here. The costs, which are passed on from the companies to the consumer.”
Edgar Sandoval and Niraj Chokshi reporting contributed.
