Trump will visit the Texas border later this month with Abbott

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Former President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he would visit the Texas-Mexico border later this month with Texas Governor Greg Abbott, after both have complained about a rise in migrants crossing into the United States.

Trump, Abbott and other Republicans have criticized Democratic President Joe Biden for rolling back Trump immigration restrictions as the number of migrants arriving at the border has reached the highest monthly levels in two decades.

"We went from having border security that was the envy of the world to a lawless border that is now pitied around the world," Trump said in statement announcing he had accepted an invitation from Abbott to visit the border on June 30.

Trump did not say where along the 1,250-mile (2,000 km) border he would be visiting. Abbott's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump made the building of a wall along the border a signature part of his presidency, saying it was needed to stop illegal immigration and drug smuggling.

Biden issued an executive order on his first day in office – Jan. 20 - that paused wall construction, saying "a massive wall that spans the entire southern border is not a serious policy solution."

Biden's order was the first in a series of moves to undo many of the Trump administration's immigration curbs and to put in place what the Biden administration has called more humane policies.

Abbott said last week that his state would build its own border wall, but whether he has the resources and legal authority to do that remains unclear.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump- ... 021-06-15/
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Trump will visit the Texas border later this month with Abbott

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Texas governor's border wall fundraiser is a lot like the effort Steve Bannon was indicted for doing

Steve Bannon was indicted when he attempted to fund a border wall for the United States, but Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks he can make it work.

According to CNN reporter Ed Lavandera, Abbott announced Wednesday that Texas would build its own wall and Texans can donate their own land or their money to the project. He didn't say if it would be a state tax deduction or if there would be any financial benefit to the donation.

He also said that he couldn't say specifically "what the project will look like, how many miles will be built or where it will be built."

As policy counsel Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Counsel pointed out, the last guy who tried to get private donations to fund the wall got indicted.

Bannon and his allies were indicted after the"We Build The Wall" scheme to allegedly defraud donors into giving money to a crowdfunding campaign that would build the wall. In fact, most of the money went to Bannon and those working on the effort.

While Bannon's indictment was dismissed, his co-workers still face charges.

It's still not clear what the governor feels must be done to erect such a structure. The fence is already there and much of it has been repaired. So, it's unclear if Abbott will build an actual wall or another fence or something else. It will likely depend on the amount of money he's able to raise.
https://www.rawstory.com/texas-border- ... d-funding/

Now that TFG is coming to be with Abbott you know TFG will want his majority cut of the funds raised.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Trump will visit the Texas border later this month with Abbott

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El Paso judge says Trump should pay debt from campaign rally during border visit

EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) – The campaign to re-elect Donald Trump for President in 2019 still owes a debt to the city of El Paso – the bill is $560,000.

As the former president and Texas Governor Greg Abbott ponder a location to visit along the U.S. Mexico border, El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego proposes Trump come with a check.

“That he (Abbott) helps us collect the $560,000 that Trump owes from when he was here on his campaign that would be really nice if that’s one of the things that we get,” Samaniego said. “That we have been trying to reach out to get the $560,000 from when he had his campaign here.”

Trump visited El Paso in February two years ago for a campaign stop that was rivaled by a dueling demonstration just outside the El Paso County Coliseum. The city of El Paso provided various services of security and transportation from Sun Metro for the president’s supporters as they left vehicles in distant parking lots.

The city initially charged the campaign $470,417 for the services. But after a collection fee was added to the bill, the total became $560,000. The campaign was charged $5,000 to use the Coliseum and made to pay up front.

“The Trump campaign has not submitted any payments for this debt at this time,” a city statement said. “You might recall that on Nov. 23, 2020, the City Council unanimously took action to hire the Law Offices of Snapper L. Carr to advocate in the City’s interest in the collection of the outstanding invoices.”

Invoices show the Trump campaign owes six city of El Paso departments for reimbursement of services. They are the following:

Department of Aviation cost, $6,286.57
Fire Department cost, $60,630.84
Health Department cost, $528
Streets and Maintenance Department cost, $6,452
Sun Metro costs, $15,577.52
Police Department costs, $380,942.12
Total: $470,417.05.

But a report by the Center for Public Integrity says it’s not rare for presidential campaigns to rack-up debts with local governments. Various campaigns throughout the years have left cities with bills, according to the report.
https://www.abc4.com/news/national/el- ... der-visit/

Don’t let him leave without paying his debt.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Trump will visit the Texas border later this month with Abbott

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Editorial: That border wall plan isn’t for Texas. It’s for Gov. Greg Abbott.

This week, as Texans were told to raise their thermostats, unplug electronics and avoid running loads of laundry that might strain our state’s fragile power grid, Gov. Greg Abbott decided the real infrastructure vulnerabilities were a couple hundred miles away.

“Texas will build a border wall in our state to help secure our border,” Abbott intoned Wednesday, surrounded by cheering Republican lawmakers eager to revive Donald Trump’s border crusade.

No doubt Abbott is playing politics with his ludicrous gambit for Texas to build its own border wall, a half-baked, Go-Fund-Me effort that should make all Texans cringe. Still, Abbott’s acts of political theater at the border, advancing his 2022 reelection bid and possible White House aspirations, have costly implications.

Although he is inviting private donations for the wall, the governor is using real taxpayer money — moving $250 million out of the state prison budget — to get the ball rolling, starting with hiring a project manager. At his behest, officials have emptied the state prison in Dilley, about an hour’s drive southwest of San Antonio, so the facility can be used to detain immigrants who trespass across fenced areas or commit other transgressions — with Texas taxpayers funding that lockup, too.

And while Abbott says he wants to work with Texans eager to donate their land for a border wall, many landowners along the border have fought such a project for years — meaning Texas would face years of expensive litigation if it tried to make a border wall a reality. By the end of the Trump administration, the federal government was mired in lawsuits with more than 215 landowners in the Rio Grande Valley who refused to allow a border wall across their property, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Texas has the largest stretch of unwalled border with Mexico for good reasons. The twists and turns of the Rio Grande aren’t easily walled off. Doing so in some areas would block the flow of wildlife and cause flooding, likely violating a 1970 treaty that requires the Rio Grande floodplain to remain open to both sides of the border. Erosion has taken such a toll on a privately-funded stretch of wall in Mission that experts last year said the wall was in danger of collapse. And vast swaths of Texas’ borderlands — from the breathtaking cliffs of Santa Elena Canyon to the unforgiving terrain of the Chinati Mountains and the Chihuahuan Desert — have formidable natural barriers that make man-made ones unnecessary.

Trump never understood any of that. But the governor of Texas does.

Nonetheless, Abbott is pressing ahead with a project that would bear an exorbitant price tag — $26.5 million per mile in some parts of Texas, according to federal lawmakers. Yet as this editorial board has repeatedly pointed out, a border wall will not stop the majority of immigrants who are here illegally, as they are people who came to the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas. It will not stop the vast majority of illegal drugs, which are seized at guarded ports of entry, not from people slipping across unwalled borderlands. And it will not stop migrants from arriving and making their lawful request for asylum, which the courts ultimately sort out.

We recognize the spike in border crossings in recent months has strained South Texas communities. Sheriffs and ranchers describe human smuggling on a previously unseen-scale: Daily high-speed chases of coyotes, the destruction of fences and pastures, the discoveries of bodies of people who perished in the grueling trek. It is clear President Joe Biden's administration has not done enough to manage the problem.

The question facing Abbott is whether to reach out to the feds in an effort to help, or whether to exploit the situation for his own political gain. Lamentably he has chosen the latter. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick went even further, baselessly declaring that “we are being invaded” — echoing the language of the gunman who shot and killed Hispanic shoppers at an El Paso Walmart in 2019.

This is not the path to making Texans safer.

Instead of biting at Biden’s heels with a rival plan for border security, Abbott should be tending to the needs of Texans. We have a power grid that failed in February, killing hundreds of Texans, and even now the grid struggles to meet the state's energy demands. We have the nation’s highest rate and largest number of people without health insurance. We have a network of highways, dams and levees that earned “D” grades in this year’s infrastructure report card by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The governor should focus on those problems, and the needs of all Texans, instead of propping up his political ambitions with a wasteful border wall.
https://www.statesman.com/story/opinion ... 744665002/

Maybe TFG will give a couple of million dollars to help build the wall. :roflmao:
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

Re: Trump will visit the Texas border later this month with Abbott

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Good editorial.
No doubt Abbott is playing politics with his ludicrous gambit for Texas to build its own border wall, a half-baked, Go-Fund-Me effort that should make all Texans cringe. Still, Abbott’s acts of political theater at the border, advancing his 2022 reelection bid and possible White House aspirations, have costly implications.
Yet as this editorial board has repeatedly pointed out, a border wall will not stop the majority of immigrants who are here illegally, as they are people who came to the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas. It will not stop the vast majority of illegal drugs, which are seized at guarded ports of entry, not from people slipping across unwalled borderlands. And it will not stop migrants from arriving and making their lawful request for asylum, which the courts ultimately sort out.

Yes, It is political drama for Abbott's 2022 reelection for governor, trial lawyers will eat up all of that "wall" money. And I anticipate there will be lawsuits over his shifting of funds from TX prisons to the fake wall.

We need public trials of people smugglers/coyotes where they are given life sentences for causing the deaths of illegals and use RICO laws to drain them of their resources.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: Trump will visit the Texas border later this month with Abbott

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Abbott is playing the Trump card hopping to possibly run for the President in 2024.
Immigration. The U.S.-Mexico border. Wall-building. Abortion rights. Voting rights. Election laws. The Second Amendment and gun rights. Critical race theory. Transgender athletes.

Do those sound like state issues, or national issues? When you hear that list — which is representative, but not complete — do you think of it coming from someone seeking a job in Austin, or a job in Washington?

It could be both, or neither. But it comes from Gov. Greg Abbott, who appeared two years ago as a centrist Republican trying to get property tax and school finance legislation through a Legislature that was marked by recent Democratic gains. This year’s much more conservative theme follows a 2020 election where Texas Republicans held their ground.

More importantly, it leads into a political year when Abbott will be seeking reelection with a Democratic president in office — usually a good sign for GOP candidates — and after this Republican Legislature draws a set of political maps that strengthen their hold on the majority in the Texas Capitol.

Add in persistent political whispering that Abbott might be considering a run for president in 2024, and that list of Texas issues being chased by the governor has national overtones.

Abbott has to survive reelection, a job that became considerably simpler with the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, who remains very popular with Texas Republicans and whose blessing is a signal to conservatives who might otherwise think of Abbott as the establishment candidate.

That’s a problem for potential challengers hoping to attack the incumbent as insufficiently conservative. Abbott has to defend his right flank, but between Trump’s support, his own popularity with voters and a campaign account balance that hit $37.9 million at the beginning of this year, he has less reason to fear the candidates from that part of the GOP. Allen West, former chair of the Republican Party of Texas; former state Sen. Don Huffines of Dallas; and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller — who’ve either jumped into or hinted at joining the race for governor — don’t have many voters to woo if the Trump supporters stick with Abbott.

For the sake of conversation, let’s say the governor doesn’t face much of a primary challenge next year. And no solid prospects have taken shape, though actor Matthew McConaughey and former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke are lurking.

There might be competition ahead, but it’s not from the right wing of his own party.

Unless you’re thinking about that national race in 2024.

That more moderate Abbott of 2019 seemed open to some mild gun regulation after mass shootings in El Paso and Midland-Odessa that summer.

A year ago, after Houstonian George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, Abbott consoled the dead man’s survivors: “I’m here to tell you today that I am committed to working with the family of George Floyd to ensure we never have anything like this ever occur in the state of Texas."

All of that was before the 2020 election. And the 2021 legislative session was influenced more by that election outcome than it was by those earlier events. The session was marked by efforts to defend police funding and, with a notable exception regarding guns, to take the police side of the argument on legislative issues. The George Floyd Act didn’t pass, though a few of its provisions made it into other legislation.

The Legislature’s big Second Amendment legislative achievement wasn’t new limits on stranger-to-stranger sales of guns, or tighter background checks of buyers. It was permitless carry, a feat of deregulation that allows most adults to carry handguns without permits or training. That bill — despite opposition by most law enforcement groups — was signed by the governor this month and will take effect Sept. 1.

The governor’s fresh echo of Trump’s call to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico is both a state and national play. Immigration and border security have been Republican voters’ “most important problem” over several years of University of Texas/Texas Tribune Polls. In the most recent poll, in April, 65% of Republican voters chose either immigration or border security as their top concern.

The governor has promised to revive restrictions on voting that failed in the final hours of the legislative session and is calling lawmakers into special session for that. Watch what else he adds to the agenda. Abbott has mentioned a bail bill that would make it harder for people to get out of jail while they’re awaiting trial, and also additional legislation to block teaching of critical race theory in public schools. Other state leaders are asking him to let them try to bar transgender athletes in public schools from competing in sports that match their gender identity.

The governor who was cautious in the legislative session before the 2020 election was unleashed by its results. He’s prepping for 2022 and beyond by dropping the “bread and butter” issues of two years ago and serving up what conservatives have been clamoring for.

Red meat.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/21 ... eg-abbott/
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.-Huxley
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." ~ Louis Brandeis,

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