The U.S.-Mexico border is a humanitarian disaster, with U.S. Border Patrol agents taking custody of upwards of 200,000 people a month trying to cross a line in the sand, river, desert shrubs or razor wire in search of a better life.
The numbers are staggering — for the burden it imposes on U.S. border cities, on federal agents, and on the immigrants caught up in the political war of a U.S. election year.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators worked hard to find solutions to tighten the border, only to watch as presidential candidate Donald Trump called on his fellow Republicans not to work with Democrats to solve the problem.
It’s not that Trump likes immigrants — far from it. He just doesn’t want Democrats and President Joe Biden to share in finding a solution. Trump sees border security as a winning theme for his election campaign and doesn’t want anything to get in the way of his selfish self-interests to be the one who saves America.
Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is pouring even more flammable material over heated emotions by picking fights with the federal government over border barriers, land access, arrest powers and more, while busing and flying immigrants to Democrat-controlled cities and states to dump the problem on their doorsteps.
Abbott, who loves publicity as much as Trump does, is locked and loaded for a court fight with the federal government over the state’s insistence that it has a right to string razor wire at the border.
Alaska has sided with Texas in that legal fight. Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor on Feb. 1 announced he had joined Republican attorneys general from 26 other states in a letter to the Biden administration, supporting Texas. “Alaska stands with Governor Abbott and the people of Texas as they hold the line,” Taylor said in his press release.
A week earlier, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy joined two dozen other Republican governors in support of Abbott’s decision to ignore a U.S. Supreme Court order allowing federal agents to remove razor wire strung up by the state of Texas along the border.
Suspiciously coincidental with all the partisan politics around border security, Alaska’s attorney general on Feb. 2 attended an unannounced, closed-door briefing in the state Capitol, limited to members of the Republican-controlled House majority coalition. Taylor, along with the Alaska National Guard commander, told lawmakers that some Alaska Guard troops would be going to the border to help with security.
Judging from comments by House members who attended the briefing, some thought that Alaska Guard troops would be boarding a plane to help with Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, a mobilization of Texas forces and other troops from Republican-led states to guard the border.
The Alaska National Guard the next day explained the 49th state is merely responding to a somewhat routine federal request for 20 troops and a couple of helicopters, not augmenting Abbott’s army.
What’s troubling is that the attorney general, who really has nothing to do with the Alaska National Guard, would think he needed to attend a one-sided, closed-door partisan briefing on sending troops to the border. Taylor’s misleading private legislative briefing came just three days after he publicly and strongly announced his support for Texas in its battle over razor wire. No wonder some legislators in the room thought — even supported — the idea that Alaskans would stand with Texans at the border.
Taylor’s apparent effort to score political points with House Republicans was either purposefully misleading or sadly irresponsible — or both. It was riding the coattails of anti-federal, anti-Biden election-year politics for the benefit of the attorney general’s own political stature.
Any effort to say it was simply a misunderstood briefing is dishonest. The private meeting played politics and stirred up emotions — for no good purpose for the state of Alaska.
A few days earlier in his State of the State speech, the governor talked of the state motto, North to Alaska. Too bad his attorney general is looking south to Texas to score political points.
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