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Texas Governor Greg Abbott along with the Department of Public Safety (DPS) on Saturday launched “ Operation Lone Star, ” a program that will work to combat drug and human trafficking across the southern border. .
The program will send law enforcement personnel and resources to “high-risk areas” along the border “to prevent Mexican cartels and other smugglers from smuggling drugs and people into Texas.”
“The crisis at our southern border continues to worsen due to the policies of the Biden administration which refuse to secure the border and invite illegal immigration,” Abbott said in a statement. “Texas supports legal immigration but will not be complicit in open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans.”
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The Texas National Guard and the DPS will work together on the new program.
Abbott’s announcement comes days after a skirmish between the Republican Governor of Texas and President Biden over the border. “The Biden administration must stop importing COVID into our country,” Abbott told CNBC on Thursday. More than 100 illegal immigrants released to the United States have tested positive for Covid-19 this week.
“It’s a Neanderthal-type approach to dealing with the COVID situation,” Abott said, using words the president had used against him the day before. Biden called Abbott’s decision to remove the mask of the state as “Neanderthal thinking.”
Meanwhile, the Biden administration faces a dramatic increase in the number of unaccompanied children at the border, a sign of resource saturation just months after the new administration.
Axios reports that during the week ending March 1, the border patrol referred an average of 321 minors per day to Health and Human Services (HHS). This is a dramatic increase from 47 in early January and an average of 203 in early February, the outlet reported.
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Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services predict that 117,000 children will arrive at the border unaccompanied this year.
Biden’s administration abolished the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), halted construction of the border wall, and revived the release program – by which migrants are freed inside the United States. This practice was halted by the Trump administration in 2019.
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He has kept Title 42 protections in place – which allow migrants to turn around quickly due to the coronavirus pandemic – but has so far not sought to apply them to unaccompanied children.
Fox News’s Adam Shaw contributed to this report.
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