A South Texas sheriff blasted Vice President Kamala Harris for claiming that the southern border is secure amid migrant influx.
“It was a great ploy by Governor Abbott to bring attention back to something that was kind of fading away from mainstream media. He’s put it back in their lap and I applaud him for what he’s done,” Goliad County Sheriff Roy Boyd told “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade on Tuesday.
This comes after Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser declared a public emergency over the migrant buses that have been coming to D.C. from Texas since April.
“We’re putting in place a framework that would allow us to have a coordinated response with our partners,” Bowser said on Thursday. “This will include a program to meet all buses, and given that most people will move on, our primary focus is to make sure we have a humane, efficient, welcome process that will allow people to move on to their final destination.”
Texas has sent nearly 10,000 migrants to D.C. since April as part of state Gov. Greg Abbott’s operation of transferring immigrants released at the border.
Bowser’s decision has sparked anger and shock from sheriffs such as Boyd, who are on the front lines dealing with migrants coming across the border every single day.
“The border is wide open,” said Boyd. “In Texas, the Border Patrol is encountering over 100,000 illegal aliens on Texas. So every month, Border Patrol agents tell me that on a good day, they encounter between eight and 15% of the number of people that actually come across.”
The U.S. has been seeing massive migrant numbers since the Biden administration announced last April that it would be lifting “Title 42,” a controversial border policy implemented by former President Donald Trump back in March 2020 that allowed the border agency to turn migrants away.
The Customs and Border Protection reported recently that the southern border had 199,976 migrant encounters in July, totaling 1.946 million migrant encounters this year.
The swarm of illegal immigrants in nearby border cities has also resulted in property damage, stolen vehicles, gun violence, and other issues resulting from migrants crossing into their counties, many of which are desolate and have sparse populations.
