Recently produced thermal video footage from a drone flying over the Texas border at Eagle Pass, showed a stream of migrants crossing illegally at night through private property. Border Patrol is estimating these crossings at about 1,400 people a day through the Del Rio sector alone. One observer commented that it seemed they were “marching in formation.”

While we can’t verify the intentions of these illegal crossers, simply the scope of these border infringements merits the label, “invasion.” In a little over two months, nearly 70,000 entered illegally just in the Del Rio area.

The stress on both Border Patrol infrastructure and personnel is taking its toll, and in some cases proving fatal. In the last year, 14 Border Patrol agents have committed suicide, setting a grim new record.

Congressman Tony Gonzales (R-TX-23) and Congressman Henry Cuellar (D-TX-28) held a bipartisan press conference in D.C. last week to honor the 14 fallen, and asking for more financial assistance for the agents facing “behavioral health challenges”— a weak response indeed, and entirely an afterthought to the originating crises, leading me to wonder how much further downstream we could address this invasion and still fool ourselves that we are actually taking constructive action to counteract it.

 

The recently unseated Mayra Flores (R-TX-34) from South Texas was also in attendance, bringing a more personal and pointed note to the solemn observances. Flores, the wife of a Border Patrol agent, says that they’ve lost many friends who died in the line of duty, and that all of the agents she speaks to say the same thing, that “they feel abandoned by this administration, abandoned.” Rather than look for more money for services to patch up the walking wounded, Flores indicted the Biden administration directly, asking when and what it would take to make them take this crisis seriously.

 

Biden, when asked last week by a reporter why he has not visited the border, replied that “There are more important things going on.” U.S. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX) angrily Tweeted his response, echoing Flores’ sentiments:

“What’s more important than the collapsing national security of the United States!? Biden needs to be fired. He’s Abandoned us.”                                     

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Abbott has made good on his promise to deploy Armored Personnel Carriers to the Texas-Mexico Border, trucking them to security points to protect against cartel criminal activity. But the lifting of Title 42 later this month will undoubtedly lead to an even more massive influx of illegal immigrants, allowing cartels and coyotes to continue exploiting the gaps where authorities are overwhelmed with processing and thus dropping the ball on protecting our border, precisely the intended strategy.

Despite Abbott’s public protestations of an invasion, he is not using the Texas National Guard or Texas Department of Public Safety troopers to halt and repel border-crossers before they enter. That would be where the rubber meets the road. Let’s remember, his use of the word “invasion” was only in a Tweet, and seems more like a show of sentiment rather than a declaration of action. Yet, Abbott still proudly touts the gains made under his Operation Lone Star, though the tide clearly has not only failed to turn, it is poised to surge as Title 42 expires.

In the wake of the expiration, citizen journalist and border resident David Nino Rodriguez predicts in his social media thread, “a full on invasion. 30,000 migrants a day.” It is hard to imagine such an onslaught, but even if his numbers are outsized, we know with certainty that flooding our border with illegals means flooding our state and its communities with illegal drugs. Massive amounts. Abbott knows this too, and surely he realizes that the seizures he brags about under Operation Lone Star of 350 million lethal doses of fentanyl are but a drop in the proverbial bucket. And so, we find him recently in Houston also touting research at the University of Houston to create a “fentanyl vaccine” and declaring it “groundbreaking.”

Again, I have to wonder how far downstream of this apocryphal disaster we will find ourselves before we are willing to go to its source? Frankly, to me this is weak-kneed and ludicrous.

And as if it weren’t bad enough, we have the dangerous lame duck Congress in D.C. threatening to grant amnesty to some 2 million illegals. Turncoat Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) proposed that the DACA “dreamers” be given amnesty, while placating border states with some 65 billion in additional funding for “security” and border guards. This proposal earned a swift and sharp rebuke from Mark Morgan, former Trump era commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.  He made the obvious point that legalizing illegals simply encourages more illegals, plain and simple, and creates a “vicious cycle” in which border security is the inevitable loser.

 

Dismissing the palliative measures of increased spending at the border, Morgan retorts, “Nothing in the Tillis-Sinema proposal — nothing — is going to stop the flow of illegal immigration. Nothing.”

 

“You could throw 100,000 more border patrol agents down there, but as long as your policies are driving illegal immigration, those resources will just be utilized to get more efficient and effective of processing and releasing people.”

In other words, a more efficient and effective invasion.

Given the grim outlook for sanity in immigration policy emanating from D.C., the Texas GOP congressional delegation has announced its own border security framework called “By Texans For Texans.” This homegrown strategy includes plans for completing the border wall initiated under the Trump Administration, the building of roads along the Rio Grande to enable patrolling, and the clearing of brush alongside the river. They look to increase recruitment of Border Patrol agents, and to see that Texas gets reimbursed billions for its border expenses. I won’t hold my breath on that last point.

The proposal requires all individuals who cannot be detained at the border to be turned away, as in the “Remain in Mexico” policy that placed illegals into a third safe country while awaiting hearings.

And perhaps easiest and most common sense, “By Texans For Texans” will defund all non-governmental organizations that encourage the violation of U.S. law, and would end the current administration’s abuse of the Humanitarian Parole application that is flouting and circumventing immigration policy.

The proposal further requires that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) remove individuals here illegally in accordance with its mission. The designation of cartels as terrorist organizations allows the government to “prosecute or deport every member, associate, and affiliate.” And it strengthens the penalties for human and drug trafficking.

“No one understands or appreciates the widespread social and economic costs of Biden’s unprecedented open border crisis like the people of Texas,” said delegation member U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington of Lubbock.

 

I applaud the GOP delegation of Texas Congressmen in D.C. for crafting this blueprint to restore our sovereign borders, a document all members but crocodile tear shedder Rep. Tony Gonzalez of San Antonio have signed. While he was weeping over the mental health challenges faced by Border Patrol agents, he was thanking “both sides of the aisle who came out today to raise awareness.” It is clear to Texans that this is leftist code for looking the other way while pretending that we aren’t.

But as good as this proposal gets, it falls short. First, we must claim our sovereign right to protect our border when the federal government will not. We must admit that the answer comes from Abbott, not Biden, and until he grows the cahones to officially declare an invasion and repulse it, this will not stop. It is not a war of words to be waged with “awareness.” It is a kinetic war against powerful foreign enemies (with the assistance of domestic traitors) to be waged accordingly. Texas has the right and the might.

I close with the Roll Call of Honor whose ranks are swelling, those Texas counties that have taken local action by declaring an invasion on the Texas-Mexico border:

Kinney, Goliad, Terrell, Parker, Wise, Edwards, Atascosa, Presidio, Tyler, Live Oak, Rockwall, Johnson, Wilson, Hardin, Chambers, Ellis, Orange, Liberty, Throckmorton, Madison, Jasper, Van Zandt, Wichita, Clay, Jack, Hunt, Montague, Hood, Wharton, Burnet, Collin, McMullen, Hamilton, Lavaca, Ector, Leon, Navarro, Waller, Fannin, and Shackelford.

 

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BREAKING: U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texarkana) has introduced the American Safety and Fairness Through Expedited Removal (SAFER) Act which expands the use of “expedited removal,” and requires all illegal immigrants without entry documents to be removed from the country if they have been here less than two years.

 

Fallon says he introduced the bill in order to brace for “a monumental migration event” due to the ending of Title 42. Said the Representative, “No more will illegal aliens receive a get out of jail free card from the expedited removal process because they’ve traveled 100 air miles into the interior of the United States,” a reference to the surreptitious practice for which the Biden Admin has become infamous.

 

The bill, clearly launched as a counter offensive to the Dem/RINO DACA amnesty legislation, has the support so far of 17 Republican co-sponsors.

This week, Texas Fights Outloud contacts our Representative to tell him that we oppose any amnesty agreement whatsoever, and support the SAFER bill introduced by Rep. Fallon.

Additionally, we stand in solidarity with the Texas GOP congressional delegation’s “By Texans for Texans,” and want to see adopted by our elected representatives in D.C. a posture of non-neogtiation on the issue of illegal immigration in the upcoming session.

Texans are the ones most impacted. Our voice should be the loudest and our position the most intractable.

 

Rep. Michael Cloud

555 N. Carancahua St.

Tower II, Suite 980

(361) 882-2222

 

https://cloud.house.gov/contact

ERCOT is currently rolling out its “market redesign” for our grid. It seems that even they, our unelected, bureaucratic, out-of-state energy overlords, have concluded that we cannot allow Washington D.C. to set our energy policy—we, the rate payers, literally cannot afford it. There is some indication that Pablo Vegas, ERCOT’s new CEO, is trying to atone for egregious past mistakes of reliance on “renewables” in exchange for the chunk of change coming from federal government subsidies to entice our generators to bend the knee to D.C.’s global warming religion.

The result of such short sighted zealotry (frankly, greed) has been to take massive amounts of electricity offline, as renewable generators, the pigs at the government trough, could make money even with negative rates. Those who would invest in reliable, on demand generation (natural gas) had to bow out. It just wasn’t profitable.

Enter Snowmaggedon, a wakeup call if ever there was one for sleepy ERCOT. We came within a gnat’s breadth of total grid failure. It is hard for us to imagine what Texas would look like today in the wake of that narrowly avoided eventuality—perhaps like Europe will look like this winter? Many energy experts have said that we would have been in 3rd world status overnight.

Can you then imagine the hubris or stupidity (or both) of ERCOT interim CEO, Brad Jones, saying shortly thereafter that he would double and triple down on renewables? If you had a hard time this Thanksgiving finding something to be grateful for in the midst of the meltdown of Western civilization, may I suggest that Mr. Jones’ exit from ERCOT was cause for jubilation?

New CEO Vegas is touting that, “The actions we’ve taken over the last year and a half have positioned us better than we have been.” That’s it? Better than we were at the brink of collapse? I must confess I was looking for something a bit more robust. When Public Utility Commission Chairman, Peter Lake, hastens to add that every year Texas adds a population roughly “the size of a Corpus Christi,” I can’t help but feel my expectations are being managed, and in a downward direction.

 

So to get into a little of the nitty gritty of the grid, of the four scenarios they ran for high demand, only one resulted in forced blackouts. This scenario was directly tied to the failure of wind output under demand. We lack “dispatchable” power. In other words, you cannot rely on wind when it doesn’t blow, and thermal generation (dispatchable power) has been displaced by subsidies to unreliable renewables.

 

So ERCOT has found the religion of reality (Vegas: “we need to build dispatchable generation”), and plans to address it through market reforms. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick chimes in, saying more natural gas generation can be developed as a top priority for the 2023 Legislature.

All well and good, guys, but you’re a little late to the party. It’s going to take years to bring new thermal generation online, and it’s also going to take an iron will to keep our snouts out of the subsidy trough because D.C. is not going to let up. 

In the meantime, ERCOT proposes what they call a “Forward Reliability Market.”  These are financial incentives for generators that perform during periods of high stress on the grid. I personally find this hysterical. It’s a subsidy on the back end to thermal generators to try to compensate for the subsidy on the front end to renewable generators. Anyone remotely interested in free markets realizes that this bears zero resemblance to such. It is, rather, a refraction of multiple layers of distortion in the energy market brought to you by bureaucrats and politicians without even a passing interest in the fundamental market economics of energy.

While Texan’s energy bills are set to at least double in the New Year, due to skyrocketing energy costs across the globe, in tandem with ratepayers absorbing the economic fallout from the colossal grid mismanagement that lead to Snowmeggedon, we have this errant nonsense issuing from one Democratic State Senator, Sarah Eckhardt, who hails from, wait for it, Austin.  Her Senate Bill 254 would double the state gas tax from 20 cents per gallon to 40 cents per gallon. This is a local version of the Biden administration’s openly declared war on oil and gas, meant to bolster the use of electric vehicles and dissuade petrol users at the pump.

But we’re in Texas, for God’s sake. We love our oil and gas, as well we should.

Let’s put this in perspective. Texas Railroad Commissioner Chair Wayne Christian toted up the figure that the oil and gas industry contributed to the coffers of State funds last year—nearly 7.5 billion dollars.

As he said, "Revenue from the oil and gas industry is what’s in the Rainy Day Fund and it accounts for billions that go to the State Highway Fund. It also contributes to state funds that pay for schools, universities, and first responders.”

This is The Texas Energy Miracle, and only the Democrats would want to kill the goose that lays that golden egg. But of course, nowhere in Eckhardt’s policy priorities (Covid-19, public education, climate change, and racism in law enforcement) are figured affordable energy, job creation, a reliable grid or a robust economy.

 

Instead, the Dems would have us pay more at the pump and more in our homes during a time of record breaking inflation, to continue at our expense their assault on our homegrown Miracle. So Lt. Dan Patrick’s legislative priority to “level the financial playing field between renewable and thermal sources of electricity generation” is a welcome guiding light to the Lege in the upcoming session, late in the game as it is. The truth is, you can have The New Green Religion, or you can have reality. Either or. Pick one.

 

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This week we are asking our House Representatives to put forward a proposal to use a portion of our flush revenue surplus to grant relief to Texas ratepayers.  The residents of this great state should not have to pay for the mistakes made by unelected bureaucrats who made a hash of our grid through failed policy. The resulting looming burden of doubling electricity rates is particularly onerous in tandem with historically high inflation rates nationwide.

 

We find this outcome completely unacceptable; and it is, fortunately, within the power of the Austin purse strings to apply some of our robust Rainy Day Fund to amend this grievous fault.

 

We call on our duly elected officials in Austin to do just that.

 

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