Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Sept. 29, 2023.
Migrants are taken into custody by officials at the Texas-Mexico border, Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024, in Eagle Pass.
Texas National Guard troops observe as immigrants change into dry clothes after wading through the Rio Grande from Mexico early on Dec. 20, 2023 in Eagle Pass.
Migrants wait to be processed at a U.S. Border Patrol transit center after they crossed the border from Mexico on Dec. 20, 2023, in Eagle Pass. A late-year surge of migrants crossing the U.S.southern border has overwhelmed U.S. immigration officials.
Texas Department of Safety vehicles line up along the bank of the Rio Grande near an encampment of migrants, many from Haiti, near the Del Rio International Bridge, Sept. 21, 2021, in Del Rio, Texas. The U.S. is flying Haitians camped in a exas border town back to their homeland and blocking others from crossing the border from Mexico.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Austin, right, wants the federal government to turn away asylum seekers at the border if the Department of Homeland Security is incapable of detaining them for the duration of the processing of their claims. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio, left, says Roy's bill would mean many are turned away, even if they have rightful asylum claims and fear for their lives.
U.S. Rep. Chip Roy of Central Texas sounds more like a Confederate secessionist with every official statement.
If the House Freedom Caucus, a minority among Republicans — who control one-half of one branch of the federal government — does not get the immigration bill it wants, then the Union might as well dissolve, the Republican from Austin declared.
“My fellow Texans rightly ask whether Texas and similarly minded Americans should remain part of a federal government forsaking their well-being, safety, and security in violation of the compact under which we entered the union,” he said in a press release. “This is not a passing concern or political hyperbole — but a constitutional crisis.”
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Roy’s echo of Sen. Louis Trezevant Wigfall (1816-1874), another Texas transplant and top Southern “fire-eater,” should disturb us all.
I agree the waves of migrants crossing our southern border are a crisis, but it’s a humanitarian one. Roy’s disregard for his oath is the real constitutional crisis. Flirting with secession, as his former boss, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has, reveals a traitorous impulse that betrays the 750,000 Americans who died in the Civil War.
Roy’s hyperbole is intended to ramp up Republican outrage over the hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people crossing the southern border with Mexico daily. The crisis is so good for the GOP that U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls plans to block any attempt to solve it.
“Let me tell you, I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating,” Nehls, the former Fort Bend County sheriff, told CNN. “I will not help the Democrats try to improve this man’s dismal approval ratings. I’m not going to do it. Why would I?”
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It is remarkable how a man who argues the border crisis is a foreign invasion of sovereign U.S. territory wants to perpetuate it.
Then we have Gov. Greg Abbott, who exacerbates the crisis with political stunts and unconstitutional laws that cost Texas taxpayers billions of dollars.
Abbott has sent thousands of Texas National Guard troops to the border, forcing them to suspend their lives and pay higher taxes. But rather than place them in a joint command with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, he orders them to string concertina wire that interferes with federal officers. Then he sues Border Patrol for trying to do their jobs.
Abbott’s attempt to force local police and state courts to adjudicate deportations will take resources away from fighting crime. Attorney General Ken Paxton must assign lawyers to defend Senate Bill 4 against a Department of Justice challenge rather than prosecuting criminals and deadbeat dads.
I’ve never understood why Texans thought it was a good idea for Paxton to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money fighting lawsuits that Texas inevitably loses. Like the deployment of citizen soldiers to the border, it’s just one big campaign commercial for Republican candidates.
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Abbott is right about one thing: the entire nation must help with the migrants allowed to remain in the United States pending the resolution of their asylum claims. Eagle Pass has a population of 39,000, and Del Rio, with 34,000 residents, cannot accommodate so many families.
The governor diminishes his good deed by turning desperate migrants into political pawns. Shipping them only to Democratically run cities and dropping them off unannounced in the middle of the night causes unnecessary suffering. It’s more proof of our governor’s casual cruelty.
Abbott cannot claim he is solving a problem when his intent is clearly to create one. Like his comrades in Congress, Abbott seeks to sap what little faith his supporters have in democracy so they will support an authoritarian alternative.
These three men are not living up to their official oaths, not unlike the one I took when I joined the Army. They pledged: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”
Seceding from the Union and creating crises violate that oath, but this isn’t about bearing true faith in the United States. These men are grasping for more power, and both think the best way to achieve it is to reelect another man who cares not a whit about the Constitution: former President Donald Trump.
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If you think Texas’s so-called conservative leaders are finding it difficult to uphold the nation’s laws now, imagine what they will do if Trump wins.
Award-winning opinion writer Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about money, politics and life in Texas. Sign up for his “Tomlinson’s Take” newsletter at HoustonChronicle.com/TomlinsonNewsletter or Expressnews.com/TomlinsonNewsletter.
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