U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a letter to Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday to end his executive order designed to stop the transportation of illegal immigrants with COVID-19.
“I urge you to immediately rescind Executive Order GA 3 7, entitled Relating to the transportation of migrants during the COVID-19 disaster,” Garland wrote. “The Order purports to mandate that ‘[n]o person, other than a federal, state, or local law-enforcement official, shall provide ground transportation to a group of migrants who have been detained by [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] for crossing the border illegally or who would have been subject to expulsion under the Title 42 order.’”
Garland called the order “both dangerous and unlawful.”
Abbot’s executive order was signed on Wednesday to restrict “ground transportation of migrants who pose a risk of carrying COVID-19 into Texas communities. The Executive Order also directed the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to stop any vehicle upon reasonable suspicion of such violation and reroute such vehicles back to its point of origin or a port of entry. DPS also has the authority to impound a vehicle that violates the Executive Order.”
Maybe Garland is a bit confused. It looks like he’s saying that it’s dangerous and unlawful to stop illegal immigrants with COVID-19 from traveling through the country.
If so, he’s the one who is acting “both dangerous and unlawful.”
When did it become dangerous to stop illegal immigration? When did become unlawful to restrict travel of internationals who have COVID-19? Americans still can’t even travel to Canada in most cases. Why can people illegally cross the southern border with COVID-19 and freely move about the country?
Is this the same science that makes the delta variant deadly enough to require a mask in the House Chamber, but not in the Senate chamber? If so, we might want to investigate. This must be a really tricky virus if it only spreads to unmasked House members who are vaccinated but not from infected illegal immigrants who pass through American communities.
The whole “follow the science” mantra shouldn’t even matter on this issue. The attorney general should be supporting American laws to enforce the security of our nation’s border. Instead, he’s writing a letter to the governor Texas to tell him to let COVID positive illegal immigrants freely travel through his state to who knows where USA.
Let’s hope Abbott is tough enough to say, “No thank you,” to Garland’s latest letter. If so, maybe our nation will still have some hope of really slowing the spread, both of the coronavirus and illegal immigrants.
If the Biden administration isn’t going to do anything to help, it should at least get out of the way of people trying to protect our nation’s border and people. The last thing we need is one more government lawyer trying to explain why our border should be open. We need a secure border far more than we need to wear a mask, no matter what the attorney general writes.
