Patrick Envisions State Border Guard
with the Luring of Agents from USBP

Capitol Inside
September 18, 2022

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick vowed on Saturday to push for a measure that would put all of the U.S. Border Patrol officers who are stationed at the Rio Grande in Texas on the state payroll. Patrick suggested that the federal agents would jump at the opportunity to be state employees instead.

"There's about 8,000," Patrick said on Fox News. "We can afford to do it, hire them and make a new state border guard so that Joe Biden doesn't have one person left. And by the way, the Border Patrol agents are heroes in my book. They hate working for this guy. I think they love working for Texas."

Patrick lashed out at "all these whiny babies up in these blue states" in reference to critics in places that Governor Greg Abbott has targeted with a plan that's bused more than 10,000 migrants to major cities controlled by Democrats in the northern part of the country.

Abbott said on Sunday that Texas had bused more than 11,000 migrants to sanctuary cities - an extension of the border security initiative Operation Lone Star. The governor added in a Twitter post that the state had made almost 20,000 arrests on criminal charges with the law enforcement operation on the border.

"As Biden does nothing, Texas continues to secure the border," Abbott tweeted.

Patrick argued that Texas is being invaded and that the cost of adding thousands of officers to the state payroll to perform the same basic service would make sense at a time when the state is spending 10 more than normal on border security based on the numbers that he touted.

"This is a financial burden on us," Patrick said in the appearance this weekend on Fox & Friends Weekend. "But most importantly, it's an invasion of our state. I've said it for a long time, I'm not shy about the word. But we have to do this the right way. But I will also propose that since we're spending so much money, I'd like to hire every Border Patrol agent on the border. Every one of them.

A border security package that created an entire new agency would be the antithesis of the anti-big government stance that Republicans in Texas touted until recent years. The Patrick proposal to have Texas pirate away the entire federal law enforcement force at the border could force taxpayers to pay twice as much or more for the same basic service once the federal government has replaced all the agents who defected to the state.

"I'm serious about this," Patrick said. "The legislators are serious about this. The people of Texas are serious about it. The other thing I'd want to do, we're spending, by the way, to put this in perspective to all these whiny babies up in these blue states, 'Oh, this is such a crisis.' We normally spend $400 million a year on border security. We're spending over $4 billion of Texas taxpayer money, money we could spend on health care, on education, on more roads, whatever it might be, $4 billion a year. We have our National Guard there on the border."

more to come ...

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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