Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced today his government will challenge an anti-immigrant law decreed by the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, whom he described as “a man of bad temper.”
The president was referring to a law signed by Abbott yesterday that allows police to detain immigrants who illegally cross the United States border and gives local judges the authority to order them to leave the country.
López Obrador said that, in addition to the challenge, Mexico is going to be against these measures, and he took the opportunity to tell the Mexican countrymen living in the United States, who are more than 40 million -and in Texas more than 10 million- that they are going to defend them.
He denounced that the governor of Texas acts this way because he wants to be a candidate for vice president of the Republican party and wants to gain popularity, but he assured that he is not going to win anything, on the contrary, he is going to lose sympathy because in Texas there are many Mexicans, many Latino migrants.
It seems that this man forgets that the United States has consolidated as a nation thanks to the migrants of the world.
He reminded him that the Bible says you should not treat strangers badly and what he does is something inhumane, politicking like detaining migrants in this cold season and sending them to New York to throw them in front of the houses of Democratic leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris said.
He repeated that he is a very bad-tempered person, a bad guy from Malolandia. Still, the same thing is going to happen to his Florida colleague Ron Desantis who went down because of those same anti-immigrant plans.
In any case, he insisted, we are going to intervene and denounce that his promulgation of that law is not within his powers as governor of a state, since they have to do with the federal government of the United States and not of Texas, he is assuming functions that have to do with foreign policy and that only concerns Congress and the Government of the country.
Already in the United States, Abbott is accused of making the most drastic attempt by a state to control immigration since the 2010 Arizona law, which was largely overturned by the federal Supreme Court. The Texas law is also expected to be quickly challenged in court.
They point out that the application of immigration laws is federal jurisdiction. But Texas Republicans have tested those limits with increasing intensity during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Texas has sent more than 65,000 migrants to other cities in the country and has installed barbed wire on the banks of the Rio Grande, which has caused injuries to some asylum seekers.
The new law signed by Abbott, which could go into effect in March, allows any Texas police officer to arrest people suspected of having entered the country without papers.
Once detained, they could accept a Texas judge’s order to leave the United States or be prosecuted for a misdemeanor charge of illegal entry. (PL)
