Greg Abbott blasts ‘Biden’s open border’ in third inaugural address
Anna Giaritelli
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AUSTIN, Texas — Republican Gov. Greg Abbott blasted President Joe Biden during his inauguration speech outside the Capitol Tuesday and vowed to focus his third term on securing the state’s border.
Abbott was sworn into office Tuesday morning surrounded by his family and state lawmakers. His remarks touted the state’s many economic victories, as well as how he believed the state could be victorious in gaining control of its 1,250-mile border with Mexico amid record-high arrests of illegal immigrants.
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“Make no mistake, the border is a crisis for one simple reason. The Biden administration is not enforcing the laws already on the books,” Abbott said in a speech. “As a result, more illegal immigrants crossed our border last year than ever before. In fact, over the past two years more illegal immigrants crossed the border than the populations of Austin, El Paso, and Houston combined.”
The population of the three major Texas cities combined is approximately 3.9 million people. Federal immigration data available online indicated that 3.6 million people were apprehended across Border Patrol’s regional headquarters in Texas between Feb. 1, 2021, through Nov. 30, 2022.
“One of the worst consequences of Biden’s open border policies is the deadly fentanyl pouring across the border,” said Abbott, who could run for president in 2024.
Under the Abbott administration’s Operation Lone Star border security initiative that he launched as illegal immigration arrests spiked in early 2021, state troopers from the Department of Public Safety and state National Guard soldiers have been deployed to the border and across the interior of the state to deter and detect the smuggling of people, drugs, and other contraband. Fentanyl seizures during the operation have resulted in 356 million potentially lethal doses of the drug being taken off the streets, the governor’s office said in a statement.
Abbott touted major improvements to the state’s power grid after catastrophic weekslong outages statewide in early 2021.
“We are home to more Fortune 500 headquarters than any state in America. We are now the headquarters of headquarters,” Abbott said.
He vowed to cut property taxes by using a surplus in the state’s budget to cover those costs. Property taxes have spiked over the past two years as more people moved into the state, prompting more demand from buyers and higher home prices.
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In his third term, he vowed to reform curricula in schools to not include progressives’ gender ideology information. Abbott also called public safety a “core priority” for the state and promised to make schools “safer” by the end of the state legislature’s session at the end of May.
Abbott has been criticized for not doing more to secure schools in the aftermath of the Robb Elementary mass shooting in Uvalde in May 2022.