SNA (Galesburg) — While it is on dubious legal and sometimes factual ground, Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” looks to be a political winner in 2024, causing headaches for US Democrats both at the national and local levels.

Launched in March 2021, Operation Lone Star is a joint operation between the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department aiming to counter illegal immigration and the drug trade along the Texas-Mexico border.

On Friday, the office of Governor Abbott issued a press release boasting of the program’s achievements to date, stating that “the multi-agency effort has led to over 496,700 illegal immigrant apprehensions and more than 38,700 criminal arrests, with more than 35,100 felony charges. In the fight against the fentanyl crisis, Texas law enforcement has seized over 454 million lethal doses of fentanyl during this border mission.”

The release noted that the state of Texas has transported a combined total of more than 100,000 illegal immigrants to Democratic Party-led cities such as New York City, Chicago, and Denver.

“Operation Lone Star,” the press release explains, “continues to fill the dangerous gaps created by the Biden administration’s refusal to secure the border. Every individual who is apprehended or arrested and every ounce of drugs seized would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and the nation due to President Joe Biden’s open border policies.”

In terms of fact, there are some areas where Abbott’s campaign is on strong ground. For example, it is incontestable that the number of illegal immigrants crossing the border has skyrocketed since Biden became president. During the Biden term, the average number of crossings has been over two million annually, more than three times the Obama and Trump eras.

However, the implication that this flood of immigrants represents a security threat to average Americans is on weaker ground. In terms of violent crime, most studies show that illegal immigrants in the United States commit offenses at a lower rate than US citizens.

Still, most Americans feel uneasy about the national borders being so porous and insecure, and they don’t like the notion of illegal entry into the country.

Abbott is asserting that Texas can defy the federal government to police the Mexico border. He has declared that his state is facing an “invasion” and that its right to self-defense “supersedes any federal statues to the contrary.”

This would be a nearly laughable interpretation of US law, except for the fact that some justices on the hard right Supreme Court appear willing to overthrow decades of precedent on this issue in order to achieve partisan Republican goals.

Additionally, all but one of the Republican governors across the country have issued statements supporting Abbott and his defiance of the Biden administration.

For the Democratic Party, this creates a dilemma. While they should be in a slam-dunk position as far as the legal issues go, a majority of the US public might back the Republicans’ position. At the local level, Democratic mayors are already struggling on how to cope with the immigrants bused in by Texas.

There is also a strong indication that Donald Trump—should he secure the Republican nomination for president—plans to use the illegal immigration issue to create relentless political grief for his liberal opponents, and this could prove an effective strategy.

This article was originally published on January 29, 2023, in the “Japan and the World” newsletter. Become a Shingetsu News supporter on Patreon and receive the newsletter by email each Monday morning.