Thread: Texas lawmakers say Washington should pick up border security tab

Texas lawmakers say Washington should pick up border security tab

Updated 1 hr ago



AUSTIN - Securing the border with Mexico was a key priority when lawmakers last wrote a budget, with about $800 million of the state's $209.4 billion spending plan going toward efforts to curtail drug smuggling, sex trafficking and illegal crossings.

The Department of Public Safety now wants lawmakers to spend more than $1 billion to hire another 250 troopers and upgrade technology to secure the state's 1,254-mile boundary with Mexico for the 2018-19 budget.

But with an incoming president who campaigned on building a wall along the same border and sending the bill to Mexico, lawmakers in both parties wonder if Texas can trim its own spending on people, boats, motion-detecting cameras and aircraft along the Rio Grande River.

“We didn’t have to spend $800 million to start with,” said state Sen. José Rodríguez, D-El Paso. “It’s a federal responsibility. If the federal government is going to do that, there’s no reason the state should be allocating limited resources to border security.”

There’s no assurance that President-elect Donald Trump will build a wall, but state Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, said he expects Texas lawmakers to “put a sharper pencil” to border spending when they meet in January.

Border security was exempted from a 4 percent cut to state agencies’ base levels for the upcoming budget that has been mandated by Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Joe Straus.

For the coming, two-year budget, projections call for $5 billion less in state funds, due largely to declining oil and gas revenues.

"Cartels are just waiting” to take advantage of a vulnerable border, Perry said, but "we’ve only got so much money."

Terri Burke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, advocates trimming spending on border security.

"State and local law enforcement have no business enforcing immigration law in the first place,” Burke said in an email. “So, if the Texas Legislature wants to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars on our broken foster care system or women's health or education or infrastructure, that would be a welcome development.”

Though a core concern in the fall presidential race, border security was not among Patrick's top 10 priorities for the legislative session that starts in January.

Instead, his list includes a Women’s Privacy Act to ensure safety in public restrooms and locker rooms, a proposal to ban partial-birth abortions and restrict the handling of fetal tissue, and a measure to expand school choice.

“Starting in 2017, we will have a friend in the White House who was clearly elected because the people of this country believe in the conservative principles that have guided the way we govern in Texas — life, liberty and lean government that promotes prosperity,” Patrick said in a statement. “I remain committed to those principles."

Rodríguez cast a jaundiced eye on several of Patrick’s priorities.

The chairman of the Senate Democratic caucus said fixing what he calls a “broken school-finance system” is his top priority, along with addressing systemic problems with foster care and child protective services.

Another Patrick proposal to force cities to cooperate with federal immigration authorities is a “manufactured issue" designed to resonate with the GOP base, Rodríguez said.

A Senate bill laying out a Patrick plan to require voter ID had not been filed as of Monday, but Rodríguez was said Texas should “make voting easier,” not more restrictive.

Recent Texas laws tightening voter ID requirements have been struck down in federal courts.

Jeronimo Cortina, a University of Houston political science professor who studies immigration, said that state lawmakers must quantify the impact of the money they’ve already spent before hitting up taxpayers for more border security funds.

And, Cortina said, addressing a bigger issue — migration — is part of the border-security question and one that not even the federal government can solve unilaterally.

“The issue of migration is not something that a single country can fix,” he said. “It’s mostly a regional issue.”

Cortina calls for regional policies addressing education, job opportunities and other factors that motivate people to cross the border into Texas.

“If not, we’re going to see this issue over and over,” Cortina said. “If we don’t have a conversation, the issues are not going to disappear.”

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I hope Texas legislature stands firm on its own state commitment to border security for at least the next 2 years or until the problem is solved. Once Trump gets in office, it's going t happen very fast, but will still take some months possibly 2 years, so until then it would be very helpful for Texas with the largest border of all to help. If you do, I can assure you that the rewards from this Presidency will render a return many times greater than your expenditures to help your state and our country control this problem in the meantime.

Put our troops on the border. We already pay their paychecks. Turn them right back around!

"Operation Return to Sender"