State lawmakers blast feds over border

Coinciding with a spirited hearing Friday at the U.S. House in which prominent Democrats and Republicans delivered moving testimony and talked past one another about the treatment of migrants on the southern border, two Texas Democrats held their own lively hearing on the matter in Austin.

State Reps. Poncho Nevárez of Eagle Pass and Rafael Anchia of Dallas convened the hearing — a joint gathering of the House committees on Homeland Security and Public Safety and International Relations and Economic Development — to ask more than a dozen state and local officials and community advocates what they needed from the state to respond to an influx of asylum-seekers at the southern border.

“We’re not going to wait for the federal government to do its job,” Anchia told the crowded room. “The committee here today cannot make immigration courts work any quicker. They cannot grant status to the migrants.”

But he said the committees could explore ways to appropriate funds to local communities to “express our values in the humanitarian effort.”

Lewis Owens, county judge of Val Verde County, told the committee that his community is stretched thin because its local officials have been forced to perform certain roles that would normally be undertaken by federal authorities. He and a number of other local elected officials implored the representatives to use state money to reimburse local governments.

“We’re going to need all the help that we can get,” Owens said. “The federal government is what it is. But y’all are more one of us.”

Owens and Ramsey English Cantu, the mayor of Eagle Pass, also called on the state to help local governments with health screenings for migrants.

The hearing touched on a number of pieces of the border puzzle. But one common theme emerged: State representatives wasted no time blasting the U.S. government.

State Rep. Richard Peña Raymond, D-Laredo, delivered the most forceful criticism, urging his colleagues, as well as Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, to take the federal government to court.

“When there are issues that have to do with the federal government not doing their job on something or not protecting someone’s rights, and Congress doesn’t move on it, it’s usually the courts,” Raymond said. “Let’s get a lawsuit going against the federal government.”

U.S. officials declined invitations to appear at the hearing, according to Nevárez.

Texas has earmarked approximately $800 million for border security over the next two years. Additionally, Abbott pledged to deploy 1,000 Texas National Guard troops to the border to aid federal efforts there. Brig. Gen. Thomas Suelzer of the Texas Military Department said that, pending Defense Department approval, approximately 750 of those troops would support two migrant processing facilities in Tornillo and Donna. The other 250 would be deployed to ports of entry to support commerce and screening operations.

Nevárez was quick to steer the discussion away from law enforcement efforts, saying the “law enforcement part is covered” and asking his colleagues to think about how the state could lend its efforts on the humanitarian front.

Representatives also heard testimony from state public health authorities who largely agreed that there is little state agencies can do to intervene in federal facilities.

Earlier in the day, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., made headlines at the Washington hearing by calling what was happening on the border was a “manufactured crisis.” Also Friday, Vice President Mike Pence, U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and other federal officials traveled to McAllen for a tour of a processing facility.

The heightened scrutiny of migrant detentions come after the U.S. Homeland Security Department announced Tuesday that the number of migrants apprehended along the southern border dropped from about 144,000 in May to about 104,000 in June — an almost 30% dip, which agency officials chalked up, in part, to the recent implementation of the so-called Migration Protection Protocols.  The policy, commonly referred to as “Remain in Mexico,” requires some asylum-seekers to be sent to Mexico until immigration proceedings can be held in U.S. courts.

That policy, which has been severely criticized by immigrant lawyers and advocates who argue that it violates refugee laws because it sends asylum-seekers to dangerous Mexican border towns, began in January on the California-Mexico border and expanded to the port of entry in El Paso in March and Laredo this week.

Despite the drop in apprehensions, Homeland Security Department officials insist that the border crisis continues.