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.

  • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    International law too. They have the right to seek amnesty. You murder them and there will nowhere to hide.

    • PopcornTin@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Why would someone seeking amnesty cross the border at a random spot, rather than an official border crossing where they could tell the workers they are seeking amnesty?

      • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Per international law, they must stand on foreign ground, not a particular place or time. A few years ago I saw figures which indicated most US illegal immigrants to the US actually fly into the US and overstay their visas. They too can request amnesty at any time and anywhere in the US.

      • NatakuNox@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Because that would actually lower your chances of receiving amnesty. And it’s not like they can just go home once denied.

      • VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf
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        10 months ago

        “why would you not go to the places where the people putting you in concentration camps prefer to catch you?” 🤔

        Probably much safer to try and get into New Mexico or California and THEN seek asylum than to give yourself up to the people allowed to do anything short of murdering you who don’t even always abide by THAT restriction.

      • badmemes@feddit.de
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        10 months ago

        Maybe because at these spots there are many people that only don’t shoot them becazse they would be charged by the feds if they did.

        Im not sure you would trust them to treat you fairly if you sought amnesty.

  • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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    10 months ago

    Wow, imagine PROUDLY proclaiming you would be a psychopathic murderer of people who walked over an imaginary line with absolutely no remorse, but the only thing stopping you is prison time…

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      This is why they’re such strong supporters of violence police and incarceration - they believe society is only held together by violence because that’s the only thing stopping them.

  • crystalmerchant@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Ah, so the reason you don’t shoot innocent people is not because it’s immoral? It’s because you’ll get caught?

  • noneya@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Alternate headline: “Abbott: Hunting season for migrants is open.”

    What a sick fuck!

  • dhork@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    If one of those migrants is pregnant, though, then wouldn’t a nosy neighbor in Texas get to sue them for murder, or something?

  • ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com
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    10 months ago

    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.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    “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.

    He didn’t clarify that immediately, he took a while. Hmm.

  • plz1@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Feds aren’t charging them with human trafficking for the bus/flight “relocations”…

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    “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.

    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.

    Texas has installed razor wire barriers alongside its border, which the Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on last week.

    We laid down this razor wire, hundreds of miles of it that was an effective deterrent and repelled migrants from entering the state of Texas,” Abbott told host Dana Loesch.

    The Justice Department already filed a lawsuit against Texas last week after warning the state not to enforce the new law.


    The original article contains 430 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 63%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • Three_word_reply@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Accept those that come and act to integrate them into society. They come seeing a better life and reprieve from persecution, just as the immigrants from Europe through the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s did.

      • Blackout@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        I am so for this. I would love for immigrants to come into my area and open businesses in all the empty storefronts and do all the hard work in restoring a lost economy. I don’t know what conservatives are trying to protect? The long picked over bones of the 50s?

    • mkwt@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Practical answer: pour funding into immigration courts and hire a bunch more immigration judges, and scale up the pro bono legal aid.

      The phenomena of mass asylum requests are driven by the 4 year wait times to get a case adjudicated. If we got that down to a couple of months, then fewer people with weak cases would attempt it.

    • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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      10 months ago

      these people dont seem to understand the migration actually helps our economy. if immigrants are successfully integrated with jobs and taxes, etc. they cause less legal problems and are a benefit to the community.

      but they cant see past their racism. this is all racists all the way down. there is no border problem accept when we choose for it to be a problem.

      we spend 2 Billion dollars a day to protect the planet with our ‘defense’… but we cant seem to figure out how to just let immigrants come in and get jobs that no one else wants??

    • noneya@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Start tracking the number of migrants leaving the country, for starters.

      Google “circular migration,” if you want to get a full grasp of what’s actually happening at the border and what the politicians don’t want you to know.