Texas AG sues Biden administration for cutting razor wire used to secure the southern border

Attorney General for Texas, Ken Paxton, has sued the Biden administration for cutting razor wire put in place to secure the Texas border from illegal immigrants trying to enter the United States, in the state’s ongoing fight against the federal government to secure the southern border. 

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday, states that Paxton is suing the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection, detailing the multiple occasions in which CBP agents have cut the wire barriers and aided illegal immigrants as they attempt to cross into the US.

“On previous occasions, agents of CBP have cut Texas’s concertina wire barriers placed at strategic border crossing locations,” the lawsuit states, “just as Eagle Pass was being overwhelmed by this alien surge in September and October of 2023, agents of CBP, without any justification, increased this federal practice of cutting, destroying, or otherwise damaging Texas’s concertina wire.” 

The suit also alleges how, “federal agents not only cut Texas’s concertina wire, but also attach ropes or cables from the back of pickup trucks to ease aliens’ ability to illegally climb up the riverbank into Texas.”

The lawsuit then goes on to discuss how the state has ”strategically positioned” concertina wire to secure the border, even getting permission from landowners to erect the wire in high-traffic locations. Despite these measures, the suit states that the federal government has cut the wire multiple times in the state’s ongoing fight with the Biden administration. 

Back in September, Governor Greg Abbott posted a video showing federal agents cutting concertina wire at one of the high traffic spots in Eagle Pass, TX where over a two-week period officials were seeing upwards of 14,000 illegal immigrants cross the border per day, which amounted to “about half of Eagle Pass’s population,” per the suit. 

However, the cutting of concertina wire wasn’t the first fight the state of Texas has had against the federal government. In September, a federal judge ordered the state to remove the 1,000-foot line of buoys that Governor Abbott had deployed across sections of the Rio Grande to deter migrants from crossing the river.

A federal appeals court granted Texas' request to leave the floating barrier in the Rio Grande, reversing the federal judge's order to remove the barrier just one day earlier.

The lawsuit also brought light to the increasingly large number of illegal immigrants that have crossed into the US since Biden has taken office. Stating that per CBP data border officials have, “encountered approximately 458,000 aliens at the border in FY2020. That number swelled to over 1.7 million encounters in FY2021 and nearly 2.4 million in FY2022.”

The suit also details how the number of “gotaways”, those who cross into the US undetected, has “increased by 303 percent between FY2019 and FY2022, reaching more than 600,000 in FY2022.”

 

Texas v Biden Admin by Hannah Nightingale on Scribd