Gregg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, is winning the competition among red-state governors to prove that he is the meanest of all. He wants to secure the border but he won’t work with the Biden administration to do it. Now, as a result of his orders, three migrants drowned. Does he have blood on his hands? I wonder if he laughed when he heard about it.

What would Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say?

Benjamin Wermund of the Houston Chronicle reported:

WASHINGTON — Three migrants — a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass Friday night after Texas National Guard soldiers blocked Border Patrol agents from reaching them, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar said Saturday.

BACKGROUND: Texas National Guard blocking Border Patrol from key stretch of Rio Grande, DOJ says

State officials had seized a 2.5-mile stretch of the border earlier this week, an unprecedented state takeover that the Department of Justice says prevents Border Patrol agents from reaching even migrants in need of emergency assistance.

Cuellar said Border Patrol learned Friday night of a group of six migrants in distress as they were trying to cross the Rio Grande near the area. Border Patrol attempted to contact Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety officials to alert them by phone, but were unable to reach them. They then alerted soldiers at the entrance of a public park that the state had fenced off and prevented federal authorities from entering.

“The Texas Military Department and the Texas National Guard did not grant access to Border Patrol agents to save the migrants,” Cuellar wrote on social media. “This is a tragedy and the state bears responsibility.”

The Texas Military Division and Department of Public Safety did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday. Neither did Gov. Greg Abbott’s office. The Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection also did not respond to a request for comment.

Cuellar said the Texas National Guard denied Border Patrol entrance, “even in the event of an emergency,” and said they would send state soldiers to investigate. Three bodies were recovered Saturday morning by Mexican authorities, Cuellar said.

Cuellar, who does not represent Eagle Pass, is a Laredo Democrat who has represented a nearby border district for two decades. He is the top Democrat on a House subcommittee overseeing funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes Border Patrol.

Open the link to read more.

The Houston Chronicle editorial board thought that Abbott’s behavior was cruel and callous. The editorial board blamed Congress for failing to enact legislation to fix a broken immigration system. No one wants an open border. Abbott was recently interviewed on a rightwing talk show by Dana Loesch, former spokesperson for the NRA, and he boasted that he was doing everything to stop the immigrants except murdering them.

The editorial began:

“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”

– Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

That’s our governor talking, folks. Yessir, he’s one tough son of a gun. Or, at least, he sounds like one. We would suggest, though, that he’s not tough at all. We would suggest that he’s a coward, not to mention an ongoing embarrassment to this state.

Despite his big talk, it is a small man who leaches power and satisfaction from the mistreatment and mockery of the vulnerable. It is a small man who refuses to consider the dangerousness of his tough talk and his callous policies. While clumsily evoking the murder of migrants could incite another El Paso massacre, his rogue, unrelenting policing of the border is endangering lives.

Indeed, on Saturday, U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, announcedthat the bodies of three migrants — a woman and two children — were found floating in the Rio Grande near an Eagle Pass park that Texas DPS troopers have seized. Cuellar said Texas authorities wouldn’t grant access to U.S. Border Patrol agents trying to respond to migrants in distress and agreed only to send a soldier to assess the situation.

“This is a tragedy, and the state bears responsibility,” Cuellar said in a statement.

If Abbott fears the criminal penalty for shooting migrants, does he fear any kind of consequences for letting them drown?…

Abbott’s intemperate remarks about guns and shooting people are merely of a piece with his immigration stunts – busing migrants to northern cities, stringing razor wire along the Rio Grande, arresting asylum seekers. The governor is afraid to dig in and look for real solutions to a complex problem — solutions that might mean collaborating with political opponents. When we made a similar criticism of Abbott in a recent editorial, the governor noted on X that we neglected to mention the letter he had hand-delivered to President Biden a year ago in El Paso.

That letter, antagonistic in tone and political in motive, demanded Biden get busy on border wall construction and make pandemic-era immigration policies permanent long after the pandemic ended. It wasn’t about solving anything. It was the same performative politics we’ve come to expect from a self-aggrandizing politician who’s not Texas-tough enough to do what’s right. Or even, at times, what’s human.