Texas to Take Action on Obama’s Border Crisis

Arnold Ahlert / Canada Free Press

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced Monday afternoon that he is sending 1,000 members of the Texas National Guard to the U.S.-Mexican border. “Over the years I have repeatedly called on the federal government to live up to its responsibility of protecting this great nation by securing the border,” said Perry, who added that he will “not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault and little children from Central America are detained in squalor.”

Under assault might be an understatement. According to Perry, more than 203,000 illegal aliens responsible for committing more than 640,000 crimes, including 3000 homicides, have been booked into Texas county jails since 2008. He further pointed out that the thousands of unaccompanied minors apprehended crossing the border comprise less than 20 percent of total influx and while enforcement agents are giving humanitarian aid to these children, “drug cartels, human traffickers and individual criminals are exploiting this tragedy for their own criminal opportunities.”

Perry’s contention about the percentage of children that illegally gain entrance to the United States was given substantial credence by the Obama administration itself. In a late Friday afternoon news dump aimed at minimizing media coverage, U.S. Border Patrol data revealed that while the number of unaccompanied alien children crossing the border has doubled to 57,525 in the nine month period from the beginning of FY2013 to the present, what the agency refers to as “family units” has seen a 493 percent increase from 9,350 to 55,420 over the same period. As the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro explains, the far more explosive growth of these family units “has been hidden by White House and agency officials, who have tried to portray the influx as a wave of children fleeing abuse and violence.” He further notes this portrayal “has been picked up and spread by Democratic legislators, reporters and bloggers” in an effort to mute the public’s anger regarding the Obama administration’s failure to secure the border.

In other words, a de facto invasion becomes a “humanitarian” crisis.

de facto invasion becomes a “humanitarian” crisis

Perry was forced to address that portrayal on Sunday with Fox News’s Brit Hume who wondered if sending the National Guard to the border would actually work when children who have “undergone these harrowing journeys to escape from the most desperate conditions in their home countries” are confronted by troops “who won’t shoot them and can’t arrest them.” Perry replied that Hume was talking about “two different things” and that it was necessary to “send the message back now so that we can staunch (sic) the bleeding” even as the humanitarian crisis that already exists is addressed. “The issue is with being able to send that message,” Perry said. “The visual of it is more important. We know that. We listen to those conversations—or, I should say, conversations are being monitored with calls back to Central America—and the message is, ‘Hey, come on up here, everything is great, they’re taking care of us,’ and that needs to stop.”