Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ® said shooting people who cross the border is the only tool the state is not using to deter migrants because the Biden administration would sue the state for “murder.”
“We are using every tool that can be used from building a border wall, to building these border barriers, to passing this law that I signed that led to another lawsuit by the Biden administration where I signed a law making it illegal for somebody to enter Texas from another country,” Abbott said on “The Dana Loesch Show” last week.
“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” Abbott later added.
Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa blasted Abbott’s remarks in a statement issued Thursday.
“The only thing stopping Greg Abbott from ordering law enforcement to shoot migrant women and children are murder charges. Time and time again, Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans have made it abundantly clear they have no morality or humanity,” Hinojosa said in a lengthy statement.
Obviously the biggest takeaway is going to be that Abbott would shoot migrants if there weren’t a federal law. Further sacrificing morality for cheap political points, yes. It dehumanizes and normalizes xenophobic murder. And seeing what has happened with Trump normalizing political violence, at this point we can almost predict when a politician does this, it’s going to be taken as the green light for violence by some extremist on the verge of action.
It’s also one more step down the fascism spiral. Because it’s implicitly a rallying cry to remove another constraint. It signals to the base that what we should be doing (if not for those meddlesome Democrats) is shooting migrants and is another endorsement of a system that allows arbitrary violence.