Texas refuses to comply with Biden administration order on border access

Texas officials have refused to comply with an order from the Biden administration to allow American border patrol agents to access a part of the US-Mexico border that is now under the state’s control.

Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, rejected a request for the state to end its control of Shelby Park, a public park in Eagle Pass, Texas, where undocumented immigrants have increasingly crossed into the US via the US-Mexico border, NBC News reported.

In response to the request from Biden’s homeland security department, Paxton defended Texas’s strategies as necessary given what he called the president’s “open-border policies”.

“Because the facts and law side with Texas, the state will continue utilizing its constitutional authority to defend her territory, and I will continue defending those lawful efforts in court,” Paxton wrote.

The dispute between the White House and Texas over immigration escalated last week after the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, ordered a fence built around Shelby Park. Abbott also announced that border agents would no longer be allowed “on that property any more”.

Later that same day, a mother and her two young children drowned in the Rio Grande near the park. US border patrol agents alleged they were “physically barred” from entering the park to rescue the family by the state officials.

Texas officials have rejected that version of events and said that Mexican authorities were already recovering the bodies when border agents requested access.

The latest political standoff at the border comes as Biden and congressional leaders met on Wednesday about a possible bipartisan immigration bill.

Biden met with Senate and House leaders from both parties about the potential immigration bill as his administration hopes to secure military aid for Ukraine through a brokered deal.

Senate Republicans have warned House lawmakers that the current negotiated deal will be the best version, even if Donald Trump were to win a second presidency, NBC reported.

“To those who think that if President Trump wins, which I hope he does, that we can get a better deal – you won’t,” the South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham said to reporters on Wednesday, NBC reported.

Graham also reportedly said: “To my Republican friends: to get this kind of border security without granting a pathway to citizenship is really unheard of. So if you think you’re going to get a better deal next time, in ’25, if … Trump’s president, Democrats will be expecting a pathway to citizenship for that.”

But while Senate leaders have expressed optimism about the immigration bill, as of Wednesday night, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, had not committed to bringing the immigration deal to the House floor, CNN reported.

“I don’t yet know what they’re going to propose. There’s been lots of rumors about it, but I’m very hopeful that they will give us something meaningful that is very close to what we’ve sent over from the House,” Johnson said to CNN about the bill, adding that “the devil is in the details”.

Progressive lawmakers have also threatened to reject the negotiated bill, particularly amid conservative concessions such as limiting the ability for arriving migrants to seek asylum, Politico reported.