Asked when President Biden might say “enough is enough” in reaction to Republican governors sending National Guard troops to aid the Texas National Guard to “frustrate federal authority,” to flout a federal court order, and to obstruct federal immigration enforcement, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said she wouldn’t “speculate on any actions the President could use.”
[NOTE: The issue grew in prominence after former President Donald Trump encouraged GOP governors to send more troops to support Gov. Greg Abbott‘s Lone Star immigration repulsion program in Texas. See video below.]
Responding to the assertion that Biden now had a lane to restrict the autonomous moves by individual state governors, Jean-Pierre conceded that those possibilities exist. “It is very clear and I would remind everyone,” she said, “that the circumstances under which the federal government can mobilize a state’s National Guard are outlined in the law.”
Question: National Guard soldiers are being used to get in the way of federal immigration enforcement and to flout a court order from a federal court. At what point does the President step in and say enough… pic.twitter.com/JK9jl8JFFm
— Acyn (@Acyn) January 26, 2024
Jean-Pierre also used the opportunity to “reiterate” the White House’s position, which is that “if these Republican governors actually cared about doing something to deal with the challenges at the border, about doing something — real, meaningful actions to deal with the immigration system that’s been broken for decades under Democrats, under Republicans, not just this President — then they would reach out to their congressional representatives, their Senators and Congressmembers in their state.”
The enduring border challenges — which Jean-Pierre says stretch across both parties and multiple decades — were the subject of recent congressional testimony by former immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who agreed, as shown in the post below: “Biden isn’t enforcing ‘all immigration law on the books.’ And neither did Trump. Or any president in decades.”
I literally testified in front of Congress about this last year! Even Justice Alito admitted in a recent Supreme Court decision that “DHS does not have the capacity to detain all the inadmissible aliens encountered at the border.”
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@ReichlinMelnick) January 26, 2024
My testimony is here: https://t.co/uHfl6reTUb https://t.co/MLBKpuxT1a
