Biden’s Immigration Treachery Threatens the Nation, Not Just National Security

The photographs that should be seared in your memory from the Del Rio debacle are not those of Border Patrol agents on horseback, defamed by their federal superiors — and in particular, by President Biden himself — for daring to do their job.

Focus instead on the photos of police vehicles arrayed in long, imposing rows on the American side of the river — state police vehicles, ordered to secure the border by the governor of Texas.

Does Governor Abbott have the authority to deploy a “steel wall” of Lone Star State troopers?  Well, he has the raw power to do it, and in crisis conditions, that is what tends to matter. And — capped by White House oracle Jen Psaki’s astonishing assertion that the “migrants” Democrats are inviting into our country don’t need the COVID vaccines Biden is mandating for Americans because “they are not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time” — the administration’s ineptitude was sufficiently humiliating that Biden hasn’t challenged Abbott’s démarche . . . yet, anyway.

As it happens, I believe the state of Texas does have the authority to exclude illegal aliens. But it is a debatable question thanks to a century of federal jurisprudence, culminating in Obama-era Supreme Court decisions that sided with the federal government’s willful refusal to perform its basic constitutional duties, and against the basic constitutional principle of state sovereignty — of which self-defense is an ineliminable element.