Biden playing ‘shell game’ with mussels to sink Abbott’s border buoys: Arrington
Anna Giaritelli
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A senior House Republican accused the Biden administration of playing politics following the Interior Department’s decision to list a mussels specimen found only in a part of the U.S.-Mexico border where Texas installed a floating buoy barrier as endangered.
House Budget Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX) compared President Joe Biden’s latest move at the border to a “shell game” for how it was an attempt to subvert efforts by Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) to bolster border security.
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“While Biden has failed to use federal powers to secure the border, he has no problem weaponizing the government to prevent states from doing so in his absence,” Arrington said in a statement Wednesday, reacting to the Washington Examiner’s recent reporting. “Clearly, Biden is more concerned about disrupting the habitat of the Mexican mussels than disrupting the operations of Mexican cartels who are destroying the lives of Americans and migrants alike.”
Arrington questioned why the Biden administration cared now about mussels when, for years, immigrants illegally crossed the Rio Grande and disrupted their natural habitat.
“Where was Biden’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s concerns when millions of migrants trampled the mussel’s ‘critical habitat’ while illegally crossing the Rio Grande?” Arrington said.
Arrington defended Abbott for installing a one-fifth-of-a-mile strand of floating buoys in Eagle Pass last month and called on the Abbott administration to “pay no attention to Biden’s shell game.”
The Interior Department’s U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced last week that it would list two species of freshwater mussels, the Mexican fawnsfoot mussel and the Salina mucket mussel, as endangered.
That same day, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Abbott that ordered the state to take down the floating barrier in Eagle Pass because it posed “threats to navigation and public safety and presents humanitarian concerns.” The lawsuit centers on a 1,000-foot portion of the border, roughly one-fifth of a mile on the 2,000-mile southern boundary.
The White House and the Fish and Wildlife Service did not respond to requests for comment at the time about the timing of the proposal or if it was a political attempt to interfere with Abbott’s buoys.
The federal government has been aware of the shrinking population of these mussels for more than three decades. The Fish and Wildlife Service first called attention to the mussels in 1991, when it published a notice in the Federal Register at the time that outlined its plans to review whether the invertebrate animal should be added to the List of Endangered and Threatened Wildlife under the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
The last review of the mussels was done in February. The Fish and Wildlife Service’s Albuquerque, New Mexico, office determined in a 109-page report on the status of the mussels that a portion of the river from Eagle Pass toward the Gulf of Mexico was the only place in the world where these mussels existed.
Mussels are “biological indicators of healthy streams and rivers that benefit people and wildlife,” according to the agency.
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The Fish and Wildlife Service projected the species “will be extinct 50 years into the future.”
Since being sued in July, Abbott has refused to take down floating barriers in the Rio Grande in direct defiance of the Biden administration’s order to remove the buoys.