1). “Will Texas Secede? The Fascist Roots of the Eagle Pass Border Crisis w/ Dr. Gerald Horne”, Feb 12, 2024, Eugene Puryear and Rhania Khalek interview University of Houston professor Gerald Horne, Breakthrough News, duration of video 13:54, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2). “Texas Border Standoff: Seeds of Civil War or All Theater?”, Feb 2, 2024, Eugene Puryear and Rhania Khalek interview Todd Miller, a Tucson based jounalist who concentrates on Border Issues, Breakthrough News, duration of video 15:31, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
3). “Is the Texas Secession Movement Getting Serious? It’s unlikely Texas will depart from the union. But with Governor Greg Abbott spouting secessionist rhetoric over border security, talk of a “Texit” is getting a fresh look”, Feb 1, 2024, Dan Solomon, Texas Monthly, at < https://www.texasmonthly.com/
4). “Can Texas actually secede from the United States? Texas Republicans are increasingly floating the “S” word in protest of federal oversight. But is Texas secession actually feasible?”, Feb 11, 2024, Brooke Kushwaha, CHRON (This is apparently a new name for The Houston Chronicle), at < https://www.chron.com/
5). “Extremists Call for ‘Civil War’ and ‘Secession’ Over Texas Border Ruling: 'The feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground,' a GOP Congressman tweeted after the Supreme Court ruled for the Biden Administration”, Jan 23, 2024, Tess Owen, Vice, at < https://www.vice.com/en/
6). “Ahead of South Carolina primary, Trump pledges mass deportations, police state actions if elected president”, Feb 12, 2024, Jacob Crosse, World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), at < https://www.wsws.org/en/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The Right-wing in the U.S. has been mounting a major political offensive and relatively clever Political Theater as regards immigration to the U.S. along the U.S. / Mexican border. Texas far-right Governor, Greg Abbot, started Operation Lone Star in 2021, and effort that commits Texas State Police and Texas National Guard troops to work at controlling the Border along the Rio Grande. Abbot has spent $4.5 billion on this effort so far.
IMHO the left and their allies among the Liberals and Left-Liberals need to get really serious about formulating winning propaganda, ideas and actions to address the immigration issue. It is just true that the great majority of working people everywhere in the world, do not want immigrants to enter and remain in their countries. The rich countries, such as the U.S., Western Europe, and East Asian countries, do not have working classes that welcome immigrants. The Rich love immigration as it forces down wages, reduces the capacity of the native working class to organize and unionize, and the costs are borne by working people not the elites. Immigrants mostly get to move into the cities and other places in the rich countries. In poor countries, that in fact have taken in the great majority of refugees and other immigrants, new arrivals are generally forced to stay in refugee / migrant “camps”, they are severely constrained from finding jobs and integrating into the socioeconomic fabric of the “host” country. This is a long-term set up for most immigrants; and the refugee / migrant camps become developed in cities and towns. In some places refugee camps are eventually attacked and their inhabitants slaughtered and/or forced to leave.
Left and left-liberal discussion of these issues point out that: 1). the immigrants are not really at fault for the socio-economic malaise that afflicts the “host” country the ruling class is; 2). the workers are needed and mostly do work native-born inhabitants do not want to do; 3). the immigrants' taxes help pay for social services like social security and medicare and; 4). the more prosperous and better educated immigrants, and their first generation children, work in high skilled professional fields, providing valuable work to the society. While all these arguments are basically true, they are also not particularly relevant, and are much less effective than are the claims made by anti-immigrant right-wingers. The right's arguments are simplistic and immediate, while the left's arguments are more complex and nuanced and at some remove from the concerns of most people.
The right-wing propaganda operation is now emphasizing the option of Texas (and perhaps some other Red States) seceding from the union. Items 1). – 5). all discuss the political reality and likelihood of any secession by Texas. Mostly these articles, and the two interviews, downplay the chance that Texas will secede. Item 6)., “Ahead of South Carolina primary, ….”, discusses the harsh and fascistic program that Trump is presenting to the MAGA crowds at his rallies.
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Is the Texas Secession Movement Getting Serious?
It’s unlikely Texas will depart from the union. But with Governor Greg Abbott spouting secessionist rhetoric over border security, talk of a “Texit” is getting a fresh look.
Secession has long tantalized Texans. Twice we’ve been moved to pursue it—first in 1836, when we fought to win independence from Mexico, then again in 1861, when Texas joined the other states of the Confederacy in leaving the United States. The latter move’s failure seemed to settle the question of whether Texas (or any other state) held the right to secede from the union. The U.S. Supreme Court case that made secession illegal—Texas v. White, from 1869—also rejected the notion that, because Texas was once an independent republic, it enjoys special privileges when it comes to secession. Still, the matter has never been put to bed entirely, and has been attracting fresh attention amid the Lone Star State’s latest clash with the federal government at the U.S.-Mexico border.
State leaders have long had to answer questions about the prospects for secession, and they’ve tended to do so delicately. When then-governor Rick Perry was asked about the subject during the tea party protests of 2009, he didn’t rule it out, saying that “if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that?” More recently, in 2021, Senator Ted Cruz outlined the circumstances that would make him reconsider his anti-secessionist position: Democrats ending the Senate filibuster, pursuing D.C. statehood, adding seats to the U.S. Supreme Court, pushing for federal control over elections, or “fundamentally destroying the country,” whatever that may mean. An independent Texas is fun for a certain type of politician to daydream about—or pay lip service to—but not something they’ve moved to pursue.
In recent weeks, though, secession has gone from a “nod to it and ignore it” issue to one with a bit more urgency. First, in late December, state GOP chair Matt Rinaldi rejected a petition from the pro-secession Texas Nationalist Movement that sought to place the question of secession on the party’s March primary ballot, in a nonbinding form. The signatures gathered by the group, Rinaldi claimed, were invalid because many had been collected electronically. The organization filed suit to challenge Rinaldi’s authority to reject the proposal, but the state Supreme Court declined to hear the case, leaving Texas Republicans without an avenue to demonstrate their support for or rejection of secession in March.
In January, though, secession came back into the headlines—this time, at the instigation of the governor. After the United States Supreme Court issued a 5–4 ruling overturning a lower court injunction that prevented federal agents from removing razor wire the state had placed along the border, Governor Greg Abbott pushed back, rejecting the court’s authority and declaring that “the federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the states.”
That language is familiar to historians of the Civil War and to legal scholars. The “compact theory” of the U.S. Constitution was used to justify the Confederate secessions of 1861, and was rejected all the way back in Texas v. White. Abbott, a former state Supreme Court justice and attorney general, is certainly aware of the history of the term and the century and a half of court rulings that reject the theory behind it. His choice to invoke it raises a question that the party, just a month earlier, chose to keep off of its primary ballot: How seriously should Texans be taking the idea of secession?
Over the past decade and a half—roughly since the inauguration of Barack Obama as president, when the Texas Nationalist Movement inspired Perry to nod at scenarios in which the state might leave the union—the question has generally failed to elicit much more than sighs and eye rolls from legal scholars, political scientists, and historians. It was easy enough to mock Perry, to point out the small following of the independence “movement,” and to dismiss the idea as a fantasy. Those responses may still be reasonable (it’s never a bad time to dunk on Rick Perry), but it’s worth considering that Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on abortion rights, was regarded for half a century as settled law, until suddenly it wasn’t. Texas v. White may have been decided a century before Roe, but if the Supreme Court is in a mood to toss out long-established precedents, there’s no limit on how far back it can reach.
I asked Jeremi Suri, the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas and the author of Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy, if the transgressive tendencies of today’s Supreme Court means that we ought to take secession more seriously, and he was initially dismissive. “No,” he said, flatly. “It’s inconceivable to me that John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, [Neil] Gorsuch, or Amy Coney Barrett would side with any state seceding. It’s hard to imagine Alito or Thomas doing that, but who knows what they’re thinking. But you’ve got seven firm votes that a state could not secede.”
As our conversation continued, he started to talk about scenarios where, in lieu of outright secession, we might see the question of dissolution emerge in another form. “Right now, it’s people trying to win points with far-right ideologues and sound tough, and express their anger,” Suri said—but he could imagine a situation in which, say, Texans voted on secession not as a threat, and not with the intention of starting a shooting war with the feds, but as a negotiating tactic to push for a system with a weaker federal government and more rights granted to the states.
“The argument would go, ‘Look, there are a lot of Texans who love the United States, but are unhappy with the relationship between the state and the [current] federal government, and this is a movement to renegotiate that relationship,’ ” Suri explained. From there, rather than making a beeline directly toward an independent Republic of Texas, you might end up at a convention of states that could win support from both the left and the right—one, say, where California has the right to ban semiautomatic weapons and Texas has more control over its southern border. “You’d address the way that the states and the federal government interact, and how that reflects a series of decisions that were made over time, and that might not best serve the needs of the states and the federal government today—that’s how you could get to the question of whether everyone might be better off as part of a . . . [more] federalist system.”
In that scenario, Texas might not land on full independence, a separate nation from the U.S., but a question like “who controls the border?” could end up with a different answer than the one the Supreme Court provided in January. Should there be a convention of the states, any part of the Constitution could be rewritten, granting new powers to states or dramatically changing existing processes.
Article V of the U.S. Constitution gives the states the ability to call such a convention, and it doesn’t place many restrictions on the process (the entire article is a mere 143 words long). It requires two thirds of state legislatures to call for such a convention, and then for amendments proposed at the convention to be approved by three fourths of the states. There are no other rules outlined for the process in the Constitution. To date, this power has never been invoked.
While it’s possible to imagine such a convention being called (19 of the required 34 states have already voted for one) the sort of consensus-building it would take to actually approve amendments by a three-quarters majority is hard to imagine in today’s deeply polarized America. Only 13 states could block movement on any given issue, meaning you’d need many of the bluest of blue states and the reddest of the red to agree on issues before anything could be ratified. But such an approach would avoid reopening Texas v. White, making it a more plausible path than most. And, as Suri noted, there are measures that could reassess certain relationships between states and the federal government that stop short of rewriting the Constitution.
“It doesn’t have to be a full-blown constitutional convention,” he said. “There could be efforts to bring leaders together, even informally, from various states and the federal government, to work out new ways of thinking about things. Congress could legislate change.”
Francis H. Buckley, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, has spent a lot of time thinking about what a successful secession movement in the United States might look like. A Canadian who studied in Quebec, which has long had its own secession movement, Buckley is more bullish on the prospect than most. In his 2020 book American Secession, he explored in detail the idea of a “national divorce.” While he shared Suri’s skepticism that a three-quarters majority of states would agree on significant changes to the Constitution, he could imagine Texas benefitting from the process.
“You could see how people on both sides of the political fence might agree to some changes; like, if Texas were to secede, the Democratic Party might say to itself, ‘You know, a national election short of the Texas electoral votes [40 out of the 270 required to win the presidency] might not be such a bad thing,’ ” Buckley pointed out. In that scenario, maybe the rest of the Constitution remains as written, but the fabled escape clause that Texans have long believed existed would be added to the document.
Buckley sees secession less as a Texas issue and more as a national one. He believes that, given our divisions, whichever party wins the presidency in 2024, states firmly controlled by the losing party will make some movement toward secession. “If Trump is elected, I expect to see some movement toward secession in the states in the Pacific Northwest and California,” he told me. In 2017, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, polling in California found that a third of the state supported the move, up from just 20 percent three years earlier. That’s significantly higher than the percentage of Texans who supported secession at the start of the Obama administration. Buckley’s time following the Quebec secession movement informs his understanding of the U.S. movement. Quebec is still part of Canada, but its narrowly failed 1995 secession vote—which revealed the province to be nearly equally split—resulted in new negotiations with the Canadian government and, ultimately, the province winning new control of immigration, distinct from the rules in the rest of the country. “You aren’t talking war—we aren’t living in the nineteenth century,” Buckley said. “We’re talking about a very lengthy course of negotiation with all of the states, where the passions can go down considerably, so what you’re really talking about is a kind of renewed federalism, which may not be such a bad thing.”
Still, there’s a reason the Texas Nationalist Movement doesn’t call itself the Texas Renewed Federalism Movement. What Buckley describes does seem like a peaceful way to reassess the relationship between the states. But part of the popular appeal of secession lies in its boldness. When Texas Nationalist Movement head Daniel Miller told crowds in 2015 that “there is no solution for Texas other than independence,” that statement necessarily precluded a slow renegotiation of federalism. Are the folks who fantasize about an independent Texas willing to let that dream go in favor of something as tedious as ongoing negotiations among states over which of their powers should be enhanced relative to those of the federal government?
“That’s why secession essentially died in Quebec after twenty-five years of intense constitutional deliberation all over the country,” Buckley acknowledged. “People finally decided they were just sick and tired of the whole damn thing. Even the government of Quebec, which was very nationalistic, has given up on it because it’s just too damn boring.” If something is too boring for Canadians, it’s hard to imagine fired-up Texans being satisfied by the process.
This is one dilemma of secession: the parts that make it emotionally attractive are more or less unworkable in practice, and the strengthening of states’ rights, while conceivable in practice, would require collaboration, compromise, and consensus with precisely the same folks that secession advocates want to get away from.
The other dilemma involves the exorbitant costs that leaving the union would impose on Texas and its taxpayers—a topic that secession proponents don’t like to discuss. (Miller, in a 2009 interview with Texas Monthly, dismissed similar points by saying “you can ‘What if’ this thing to death” without noting that, should his movement achieve its aim, those questions would, in fact, “what if” his plan until its leaders had satisfactory answers, or until it died.) After secession, Texas would need to either create expensive systems to replace Social Security and Medicare, or to tell newly minted citizens of the Republic of Texas that those programs no longer exist. It would need to provide for national defense. It would have to pay the U.S. government for military bases, national parks, and federal prisons. It would have to assume its fair share of the $34 trillion national debt. It would have to pay interest on that debt. It would, as Suri noted, lose the federal research and financial aid dollars that keep Texas’s universities educating students, and the federal funding that keeps its hospitals functioning. TxDOT would have to maintain highways without federal aid. “There’s a big difference between 1861, when the federal government was small, and you could live in Texas and have no connection to it,” he pointed out. “There was no Social Security, no real federal military presence in Texas. The federal government was pretty much nowhere, so you could conceive of living without it.”
Could the Republic of Texas make up the difference by establishing a national income tax? Hardly—the state currently receives more from the federal government than it pays in taxes. In 2021, the last year for which data is available, Texas sent the federal government an average of $10,443 per Texan in taxes, while receiving $11,981 per Texan—for a net annual inflow to Texas of approximately $45 billion.
Ultimately, no one knows how popular the idea of an independent Texas truly is—though if limited polling data is any indication, it may be gaining traction. The question has been polled four times since 2009; in three of those polls, taken between 2009 and 2016, it received between 15 and 26 percent support, meaning it would—at best—be rejected by a nearly three-to-one margin. A 2022 poll by a different pollster, meanwhile, found that Texans favored secession by a 60/40 split, which, if true, would indicate a 53-point swing from 2016.
Sanford Levinson, a professor of government at the University of Texas School of Law, said he would have liked to see the concept’s popularity put to a vote. He recalled the surprise, and national headlines, in 2017 when high schoolers at Texas Boys State passed a secession bill in their mock legislature. “Nobody knew what to do with that. Was it simply ‘boys will be boys’ or was it a portrait of the future? So I’m sorry that it won’t be on the ballot—as an academic, I’d be very interested in simply knowing what the numbers would be.”
And Levinson understands the renewed consideration, given the divided state of the nation, where a lost election triggers accusations of fraud and even an insurrection. “I don’t think you have to be crazy to say the U.S. is just too large to be governed effectively,” he said. The point of a constitution isn’t to guarantee that everyone gets what they want, after all—it’s to ensure that people who disagree, even vehemently, can tolerate sharing power with one another. If that’s changed, then maybe the question of secession is less “should Texas be its own country again” and more “can the U.S. survive as it is?”
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Can Texas actually secede from the United States?
Texas Republicans are increasingly floating the “S” word in protest of federal oversight. But is Texas secession actually feasible?
By Brooke Kushwaha
Feb 11, 2024
Can Texas really secede or is it the political equivalent of flipping the Monopoly board when you don't like the game?
Can Texas really secede or is it the political equivalent of flipping the Monopoly board when you don't like the game? rarrarorro/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Secession. It's the word on the tip of every Republican's tongue and a slogan stuck to the bumper of every new-model Ford F150. Former Texas governor Rick Perry first reignited the the conversation when he floated the possibility of a Lone Star State secession during a Tea Party rally in 2009. His suggestion that Texas "can leave any time we want," was widely laughed off, dismissed, and later even met with outrage.
While Perry eventually backpedaled on those comments in his lead up to a 2012 presidential run, the message was clear: Texas' independent spirit cannot and will not be killed. Since 2003, schoolchildren have pledged their allegiance each morning to the Lone Star flag alongside America's star-spangled banner. What difference would it make to switch out one for the other?
Since Perry's comments, secession has gone from an offhand comment to an increasingly popular Republican party pick-up line, even making it onto the official Texas Republican Convention platform in 2022. Most recently, Governor Greg Abbott suggested the nuclear option in his immigration standoff with feds at the border town of Eagle Pass. Fed up with what he sees as the Biden administration's too-soft approach on immigration, an "invasion" of his state as Abbott call its, he joined a lengthening roster of Republicans now calling for an independent Texas.
"If Texas ever wants to truly secure its border," secessionist leader Daniel Miller told Texas Tribune last month, "the only way we're going to do it is as an independent and self-governing nation." In some ways, the proposition isn't as crazy as it might seem. Texas has the resume to hold its own as an independent country: a strong economy, the ability to draw in big business, and even relevant past experience.
But can Texas really, truly secede from the union? Or is it the political equivalent of flipping the Monopoly board when you don't like the game?
Texas was independent.
Coming off of its war of independence from Mexico, Texas functioned as its own standalone republic from 1836 to 1845. Although many Texans now regard those nine years with wistful fondness, at the time Texans tried repeatedly to join the U.S. They were rejected by two presidential administrations until James K. Polk finally signed the act to admit Texas as a state in December of 1845, just days before the deadline.
Gov. Perry has falsely asserted that the agreement allowed for Texas to pull out at any time. Not so. The language allowed Texas to be broken up into multiple states if desired. The only unusual part of Texas' annexation is that the state retained title to its public lands, provided it also retained the $10,000,000 debt it incurred during its sovereignty—about $403,613,158 today.
But Texas has seceded before.
Stop me if you've heard this one: Just 16 years after joining the union, Texas voted to secede and join the Confederate States of America in 1861 over a disagreement on whether to expand slavery to the Western territories. Then Texas fought in the Civil War and lost. They were eventually readmitted to the States by President Grant in 1870 after Texas revised its state constitution and ratified a few new constitutional amendments for good measure.
But this time could be different.
Texas does have a lot going for it. If it were a country, it would boast the world's 15th most powerful economy, largely reliant on the export of oil and gas reserves. It's the second most populous and the third fastest-growing state in the country—top of the list with Gen Z transplants—despite left-wing concerns that its hardcore stances on reproductive healthcare and trans rights would cause a mass Tex-odus.
That doesn't change the fact that Texas relies on federal funding for public education, social services, and military aid. For 2024, Texas received $26.9 billion in federal funding after taxes, the second-highest total behind West Coast rival California ($43.6 billion). Plus, Texas would have to renegotiate its trade agreements with the U.S. and neighboring countries, meaning everyday goods could become exceedingly expensive.
"There's a big difference between 1861, when the federal government was small, and you could live in Texas and have no connection to it," Jeremi Suri, author of Civil War by Other Means, told Dan Solomon of Texas Monthly last week. "There was no Social Security, no real federal military presence in Texas. The federal government was pretty much nowhere, so you could conceive of living without it." But hey, we could finally build that wall.
So… maybe let's give it a shot?
Not so fast. In 1869 on the heels of Texas’s first divorce, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the state never actually had any right to secede and in fact had remained a part of the U.S. even through the Civil War. Their decision reiterated that a state cannot leave the union through its own power, even with a majority referendum.
That closes the door to advocates who saw Great Britain leave the European Union in 2016 and thought, "Why not a Texit of our own?" The E.U. has only existed since 1993, giving the U.S. about 200-plus years of practice in dealing with defectors. That legal loophole has been tied up for a while.
Then why do politicians keep trying?
Despite its logistical impossibility, secession is hardly a fringe sentiment among Texans. It offers a tempting escape hatch from unpopular federal policies, and makes candidates look tough—like Abbott suggesting that "the federal government has broken the compact between the United States" and Texas—while giving them a campaign promise they never have to deliver on.
So go ahead, don your cowboy boots, fly your "come and take it" flag on Texas Independence Day. It's still the best way to show off your Texan national pride.
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Extremists Call for ‘Civil War’ and ‘Secession’ Over Texas Border Ruling
“The feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.”
That’s not a post by an anonymous user on a fringe messageboard. That was a post on X by Rep. Clay Higgins, a GOP congressman from Louisiana, who was responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Biden Administration—and not Texas—has jurisdiction over border enforcement.
Higgins’ post was shared widely across extremist online ecosystems, who lapped up the incendiary language. “Man if that shit pops off it’ll be open season on feds,” one person on far-right forum Patriots.win said in response. “It’s already started. One side is fighting. The other isn't,” remarked another.
Last October, Border Patrol agents started cutting through the miles of razor wire that Texas officials had erected along the border without the permission of the federal government, triggering a legal battle between the Biden Administration and the Lone Star State that ended up at the Supreme Court.
This month, Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, which sits on a 50-acre stretch of the Rio Grande and is a popular point for unauthorized crossings, became a lighting rod for that fight and a staging area for Gov. Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star.”
The Texas National Guard seized control of the park and surrounded it with razor wire, which Border Patrol said limited their surveillance abilities and their access to a boat ramp that agents use to patrol that stretch of the river.
Following the takeover, the DOJ filed a brief to the Supreme Court, saying that Border Patrol could no longer access or view that stretch of the border. “Texas has effectively prevented Border Patrol from monitoring the border to determine whether a migrant requires the emergency aid that the Court of Appeals expressly excepted,” the DOJ wrote. Last week, three migrants—a woman and her children—drowned in the Rio Grande just near Shelby Park. Border Patrol claimed that the Texas National Guard prevented them from saving them, which Texas has denied.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4—including two conservative appointees who sided with liberal justices—that Border Patrol agents are entitled to cut down the razor wire.
Hardline anti-immigration rhetoric, including explicit references to the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, has loomed large over the GOP 2024 campaign trail amid the escalating standoff between Texas and the federal government over the border. Migrants coming over the southern border have been cast as “invaders” and falsely characterized as predominantly “military-aged males.”
Now, the Supreme Court’s decision is acting as kerosene in an already inflamed political environment. Far-right pundits and lawmakers say the ruling is proof that the federal system is fundamentally broken and that Texas should continue to assert authority on the border, no matter the consequences.
On Tuesday, Texas officials signaled that they plan to do just that.
Spokesperson for Texas’ Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez said in a post on X that the state will “maintain its current posture in deterring illegal border crossings by utilizing effective border security measures,” which he said includes razor wire. “#Texas will continue to hold the line,” he added.
“This is not over,” Gov. Greg Abbott posted. “Texas’ razor wire is an effective deterrent to the illegal crossings Biden encourages.”
“This fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on X.
Abbott and other GOP lawmakers and commentators claim that Texas is constitutionally entitled to exercise authority under Article IV, Section 4, which they say endows states with special powers to “protect each of them against invasion.”
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested on X that “everyone in power,” including the White House, “hedge fund managers,” and the Supreme Court, are part of a plan to “destroy the country by allowing it to be invaded,” and thinks that ordinary Texans need to join the fight.
“That leaves the population to defend itself,” Carlson wrote. “Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and their nation?”
“To the Republic of Texas & my brothers in the trenches holding off an invasion, we see you kings,” one Proud Boy chapter wrote on Telegram. “We’ve all been betrayed and sold out by an illegal government that’s sole mission is [to] destroy our traditions, freedoms and way of life. We refuse to concede our nation to the communists. America is counting on you to hold the line.”
Verified right-wing accounts on X made similar calls to arms. “Texas should secede,” wrote Gunther Eagleman, who describes himself as an “America First political commentator. “Fuck the Feds.”
“Fuck the Supreme Court,” wrote “SteveLovesAmmo” to his 90,000 followers. “Buy guns and ammo. Your government isn’t coming to save you.”
There’s also a new meme circulating in conservative and anti-government online circles, showing a row of razor wire, the Texas lone star, and the words “come and cut it.”
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Ahead of South Carolina primary, Trump pledges mass deportations, police state actions if elected president
Ahead of the South Carolina Republican primary on February 24, former President Donald Trump escalated his fascistic attack on immigrants while campaigning in Conway in front of a few thousand people.
“We are allowing people to pour into our country,” Trump taunted. “They are going to cause tremendous problems. They are coming in from everywhere… millions of illegal aliens unchecked from Somalia, the Congo, Libya, Iran… lot of people coming from China, Russia.”
Painting immigrants as an invading army, Trump said there are “very few women coming in.” Instead they were mostly “18–25-year-old men, fighting age. They have something planned… They are destroying our country.”
Trump was joined by virtually the entire Republican leadership in South Carolina, including Gov. Henry McMaster, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and Reps. Russel Fry, Nancy Mace, William Timmons and Joe Wilson. Trump specifically boasted about his role in sinking the bipartisan anti-immigrant and war package that President Joe Biden demanded passage of last week.
“We crushed crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous open borders bill,” Trump bragged, adding, “[House Speaker] Mike Johnson did a very good job. We saved America from a very horrific Biden betrayal.”
While that bill has been defeated, in a rare Sunday vote, senators from both parties voted, 67–27, to advance a $95.3 billion military package for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific, which was stripped of the border provisions that had been previously negotiated.
Prior to the vote, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) demanded the bill’s passage, writing on his Twitter/X account, “If America doesn’t send aid to Ukraine with this national security bill, Putin is all too likely to succeed. The only right answer to this threat is for the Senate to face it down unflinchingly, by passing this national security bill ASAP.”
While Democrats focus on war above all else, in his speech Trump claimed that Biden’s “horrendous border plan would have allowed millions upon millions” to “flood into the country unchecked.”
Trump promised, if elected, to carry out the largest mass domestic deportation operation in the history of America. “The border problem is a big problem,” Trump said, “On day one I will terminate every open border policy of the Biden administration, and I will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. We have no choice. We have no choice.”
Appealing to police and government agents, Trump promised that if elected he would indemnify police from being sued by “the radical left for taking strong actions on crime.”
Trump’s police state plans are not just idle boasting. In an article published by the Atlantic titled “Trump’s ‘Knock on the Door,’” the magazine reported on an extended interview Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior advisor and speechwriter, conducted with Charlie Kirk, the far-right leader of Turning Point USA, last November.
Miller was the architect of several of Trump’s anti-immigrant proposals and will likely have a senior role in any future administration.
In the interview, Miller explained how a future Trump administration would deport some 10 million “foreign-national invaders.” Miller said that in order to carry out large-scale deportations, the administration would “deputize” National Guard soldiers from states with Republican governors to serve alongside ICE and Border Patrol.
“You go to the red-state governors and say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” Miller told Kirk. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.” These newly deputized National Guard soldiers, Miller explained, would then go “around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.”
Miller said these joint deputized National Guard and border police stormtroopers could even be sent into an “unfriendly state” to carry out raids. To circumvent Democratic governors who might resist, Trump, as he promised to do during the mass protests against police violence following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, could invoke the Insurrection Act, which would provide the president with virtually unlimited authority to use any military asset.
Miller explained that the thousands of people rounded up would then be sent to “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas.” From these concentration camps, Miller said the federal government would be running around-the-clock flights out of the country.
“So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.
As Republicans openly campaign on creating a massive police state, under Biden immigrants continue to suffer. This past Saturday, humanitarian aid group No More Deaths (No Más Muertes) reported that Border Patrol refused to process 400 immigrants who had crossed the border in order to claim asylum.
In a February 10 press release, the group stated that even as “snow and freezing temperatures set in,” Border Patrol never came to assist the asylum seekers who were in Sasabe, Arizona. When volunteers with the organization and other aid groups attempted to assist the asylum seekers by providing transportation to the local Border Patrol station, they were arrested and detained by the border police.
It was not until Sunday evening that No More Deaths reported that all the migrants had finally been taken into custody by Border Patrol. It is unclear as of this writing if any of the immigrants died as a result of the prolonged exposure.
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