Texas GOP turbocharges immigration fight as races tighten

AUSTIN, Texas — As polls show narrowing national races in Texas, and as the flow of migrant crossings at the Mexican border has slowed, Republicans and Democrats are pivoting on their immigration strategies.

Republicans have focused recently on sweeping and unproven allegations of widespread voting from immigrants who are living in the country illegally — which Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has repeatedly cast as part of a grand Democratic plan to “fix” the U.S. as “one-party state.”

The Democratic candidate for Senate, in turn, has said the GOP's approach is "all hat and no cattle."

And both parties are laying claim to credit for the drop in border encounters.

Paxton announced Wednesday that his office had created a tip line for Texans to report ballot fraud, a phenomenon that repeated studies have found to be very rare, but that Paxton and many state Republicans insist is a clear and present threat. In a statement, he warned of “significant growth of the noncitizen population in Texas and a pattern of partisan efforts to illegally weaponize voter registration and the voting process to manipulate electoral outcomes.”

This language followed the attorney general’s searches last week of Democratic operatives and a candidate in South Texas, in what Democrats and Latino rights groups have called intimidation.

It came on the steps taken by Gov. Greg Abbott (R), who announced Tuesday that his office had removed more than 1 million people from state voter rolls in what he said is an effort to “protect the right to vote and to crack down on illegal voting.”

Though Abbott characterized the move as a key step in maintaining the integrity of elections, this step — and this number of removals — is fairly commonplace. 

Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R) told the New York Times that losing 1 million voters from the rolls was standard in a state where “in a two-year cycle, 10 percent of your roll might move.”

But it comes as part of a broader electoral strategy by Abbott, who made the case Tuesday on NewsNation that Texas could solve the border problem on its own — but that it was being stymied by national Democrats.

In a common GOP trope dating back to the Trump presidency, Abbott warned, without evidence, of oncoming “caravans” that would reverse the decline, potentially “around election time” — a group he characterized as endangering the U.S.

“Let's assume Texas does succeed in reducing illegal immigration 100 percent into our state — all those terrorists, all those murderers, all those rapists, they're just going to go through New Mexico and Arizona and California.”

Abbott charged that President Biden “stepped in and rode on our coattails” after his Operation Lone Star chased migrants away from Texas — a claim immigration experts are “skeptical” of, the Texas Tribune has reported.

That slide in crossings began in June, after Biden released an executive order that shut down asylum claims and entries whenever the number of migrants apprehended between ports of entry passes a threshold of 2,500 per week.

The head of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection credited Biden’s restrictive measures to the Texas Tribune with “a meaningful impact on our ability to impose consequences for those crossing unlawfully.”

But crossings were already trending downward when the Biden order was released, and other analysts have pointed to high-level deals the U.S. made with Mexico to keep migrants from reaching the border from the Mexican side.

“A lot of this is down to Mexico’s actions in preventing migrants from getting to the border in the first place,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told the Tribune.

Migrant apprehensions on the U.S. Mexico border in July — the last month for which Customs and Border Protection has released numbers — were at their lowest level since July 2020. 

That's a change that, until Biden dropped out, both sides had taken credit for, pointing to restrictive policies they've backed. In June, Biden claimed his administration's policies had led to the drop in crossings. In the NewsNation interview Tuesday, Abbott acknowledged crossings are down 85 percent this year — a decline preventing him from sending migrants to Northern cities.

But analysis from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) suggests both sides are confusing the short-term impacts of higher enforcement — which tends to drive down crossings as migrants reconsider their options — with a sustained, longer-term bounce back.

“Every single one of those policies does push the numbers down for a few months, and then they start to recover and come right back,” WOLA's Adam Isacson told NPR in June. And Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute told PBS that Vice President Harris's forward strategy of tackling “root causes” of migration would take a long time to change migration patterns, if it ever would.

“Even a whole lot of economic development doesn’t curb immigration in the way countries hope it will,” she said.

Harris herself has largely stayed away from taking credit for the border in favor of attacking Republicans on it — something Texas Democrats have echoed. Harris moved to the right on immigration policy in her speech at the Democratic National Convention this month. The New York Times noted she has largely avoided talking about the Biden-Harris administration's restrictions — which could ignite controversy over those measures within her party — and instead has focused on hitting Republicans as unconcerned with border security.

“I know we can live up to our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants and reform our broken immigration system,” she said in her convention speech. “We can create an earned pathway to citizenship — and secure our border.”

Decision Desk HQ notes both former President Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R) are still strong favorites to win Texas. But polling is narrowing.

A survey in early August of 1,365 state residents by the University of Houston’s School of Public Affairs found Harris was just 5 points behind Trump, and Cruz was just more than 2 points ahead of Rep. Colin Allred (D).

For his part, Allred has sought to cast the Republican approach as empty politics.

In an interview in the El Paso Times on Wednesday, Allred accused Cruz — who a day prior alleged Harris was “risk[ing] our national security by letting in millions of illegal aliens” — of using migration for political gain without helping to fix it.

“We can have a senator that will both help us secure the border and pass comprehensive immigration reform, and who wants to see our border communities thrive,” he said.

At the Republican National Convention, Cruz cast migrant crossings as an “invasion,” language that has become common among the Texas GOP.

“Not figuratively, a literal invasion: 11.5 million people have crossed our border illegally under Joe Biden,” he said. CBS fact-checkers argued this figure overstates the number, incorrectly conflating every encounter with a successful entry.

“You can’t look in the eyes of little boys and girls who have been brutalized by cartels without it staying with you,” Cruz said at a campaign event in mid-August.

In that speech, Cruz also blamed Biden administration policies for the 100,000-plus Americans who have died of overdoses, about 70 percent of them from the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is largely manufactured overseas and imported. 

“Kamala Harris and Colin Allred can’t defend it. They don’t have an answer for it,” Cruz said. “Their answer is: They want more of it.”

He added that “illegal immigrants are committing crimes every damn day.”

Most fentanyl importers are U.S. citizens, according to a 2022 report from the libertarian Cato Institute, which has also repeatedly found that the rate of crimes committed by immigrants is far lower than the average for U.S. citizens.

Allred, in turn, has echoed Harris in repeatedly pointing to Cruz’s vote against a bipartisan border bill that failed in the Senate in May.

“We had a bipartisan bill in the Senate that no state would have benefited more than Texas,” he told the Longview News-Journal on Wednesday

“Ten thousand migrants a day is a crisis,” he said, but added that “the asylum system is not set up to deal with these numbers, and it's also not set up to be an alternative to legal immigration United States."

Cruz, Allred told the News-Journal, had fought immigration reform since 2013, when efforts were being led by then-President Obama, and continued those efforts in helping vote down the bill in May. 

That bipartisan bill was the latest in a decades-long series of restrictive Washington border legislation that many experts told The Hill helped create the current dysfunction, as The Hill reported. It failed in large measure because of opposition from Trump, who characterized it as “codif[ying] Joe Biden’s open border.”

In his campaign, Allred, who grew up in the Texas border city of Brownsville, has sought to cast Cruz as uninterested in solutions. 

“Out here they don’t have time for politics,” Allred says in an early August ad from the border. “That’s all we get from Ted Cruz.”

Cruz, Allred added, “gets nothing done. He’d rather play politics with the border than actually fix the problem — because Ted Cruz only cares about Ted Cruz.”

In an El Paso Times interview, Allred pointed to the "root causes" strategy on immigration espoused by Harris in Central America's Northern Triangle — the kind of approach he argued has worked in the recovery of Colombia from war and chaos over the past two decades. 

"We can use some of the institution-building and some of the efforts we've seen have worked in other hot spots around the world to get these countries in a better place," he said. "It is possible, and we've seen that we are able to do that."