TexasCHLforum.com

powerboatr wrote: ↑Wed May 10, 2023 1:27 pm a guy in news this morning somewhere in texas was stating governor has the legal authority to STOP all flow along the texas border, including inept federal agencies and take control.

I don't know that the statement, broadly represented as it is, is true. The national border is federal purview and while the state government has some measures that can be exercised--and I think Abbott has been doing so much that he's even been pushing that envelope--I don't believe there is any authority for a state to exercise the closure and enforcement thereof of a national border except under Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution.

I think the most recent precedent from SCOTUS was in 2012 with Arizona vs. the United States. The basic summary from that was that while the majority opinion struck down Arizona law imposing state penalties for certain immigration offenses (for example, AZ tried to make failure to comply federal alien registration a state misdemeanor and SCOTUS canned that and other things), in the end what remained was that the state had the right to check the immigration status of individuals they arrest, stop, or detain if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that they are in the country illegally. In other words, they couldn't be stopped or detained just because they might be illegals; the state could only check their immigration status if they had already been stopped for some other reason that was a violation of state law.

What Abbott can do (and is doing) in my admittedly limited understanding is mobilize state resources to increase enforcement of state laws like trespassing, smuggling, human trafficking, evading arrest, etc., and to support the federal enforcement personnel at their request. In other words, Texas has no jurisdiction to unilaterally arrest someone wading across a sand bar in the Rio Grande. Immigration is not a state crime. Texas personnel can't hold their rifles on the waders and order them to turn around or be arrested or shot.

In part that's why the Texas State Guard troops that were mobilized this week make it very, very clear in interviews that they are there not in a military or direct enforcement capacity, but are there to assist any state law enforcement activities of the DPS and to assist the federal border control officers as requested. If DPS officers think something like smuggling or trespass on private land is happening, they can call in the Guard to help with enforcement. But basically the Guard is there in full gear load-out to look imposing.

Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the Constitution authorizes a state to act to protect its citizens who are under threat of "invasion or imminent harm." I think that's where the talk comes from that Abbott has legal authority to do more than he's doing. But in fact that language has precedent to show that its meaning is pretty literal: a military style invasion and/or imminent physical danger or harm. I'll buy that those points might be arguable when we're taking about 10,000+ illegals just traipsing across as they please every single day. But unless it's an armed mob or militia coming across, Article I doesn't give Abbott the authority to take action and usurp the federal mandate to manage and secure the national border.

Under the Constitution and federal law, Abbott has to work with one hand tied behind his back. Eventually, things he's already done--like bussing willing immigrants to New York and Chicago--may end up in lawsuits to be decided by SCOTUS. But Texas is expending a lot of resources and has a lot of personnel at the border...because Biden and the DHS won't do it.

If you traipse across that sand bar carrying nothing but some clothes and water and are being peaceful about it, even if Texas DPS could legally arrest you, their only option then would be to turn you over to ICE or the Border Patrol which means, given Biden's catch-and-release program, that you would just be fed, processed, promise to report to a hearing months in the future, and be released back into the very community you were entering illegally anyway. And as of tomorrow and the end of Title 42, the chaos at the border is going to become a flat-out national nightmare.

Oh, and don't forget that while Mayorkas whines about not having any resources, his DHS got over $2 billion more in new funding under Biden than the department had under Trump. So, wow, if it's so bad now and DHS has a much larger budget, the border crisis must have been positively insane during the Trump administration. Oh...wait a minute...

To add to that, this was posted 3 hours ago by ABC News:

At-large Texas mass shooting suspect had been deported 4 times: Source
https://abcnews.go.com/US/manhunt-conti ... d=98968745

Francisco Oropesa, the man on the run after allegedly killing five Texas family members, is a Mexican national who was previously deported four times, a source familiar with the investigation told ABC News.

Oropesa, 38, was deported on March 17, 2009, after an immigration judge ordered his removal, the source said. He unlawfully returned to the U.S., and he was then apprehended and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in September 2009, January 2012 and July 2016, the source said.

Oropesa had also been convicted in Montgomery County, Texas, in January 2012 of driving while intoxicated and served time in jail, the source said.

Yet the never-liberal Dallas Morning News just posted an opinion piece less than a hour ago saying that "Texas's latest mass shooting is about guns, not immigration." Maybe it's really about, oh, I dunno, getting people to follow the laws already on the books?

(Sorry; can't link to the article because it's behind a paywall...and I'm sure not going to pay to see it.)

I took a quick--and inconclusive--glance after seeing the barrage of asinine hit-job ads against Abbott that started flooding my local news stations and even my local feed via Xfinity of Fox News. You know, the ones where a slowly zooming-out close-up of Abbott is shown while a disembodied voice gravely intones non sequitur "trigger" phrases like "AR-15s"..."everywhere"..."Uvalde school shooting."

The commercial ends with a video clip of Abbott saying, immediately after the Uvalde shooting and before the seeming LEO negligence came to light, that it, "could have been worse." And then we find that the ad was paid for by the improbably named Coulda Been Worse LLC.

So I did a little hunting. Coulda Been Worse LLC is not a Texas entity. It was formed in Delaware. You can search for the name here: https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/Ecorp/En ... earch.aspx. But you won't find much, even if you pay the $20 fee for what status and history Delaware will provide. The LLC was formed just last August.

The State of Delaware, just like its homeboy Biden, reveals fewer details about businesses than just about any other state in the union. Delaware has some of the most lax corporate laws in the country, allowing people to form corporations, LLCs, and partnerships while providing very little public information about themselves. That's one reason so many businesses are incorporated in such a tiny state.

The registered agent for Coulda Been Worse LLC is an outfit called Corporation Service Company, in Wilmington: https://www.cscglobal.com/cscglobal/home/. These guys are basically a professional hidey-hole. They keep their clients completely anonymous. They're also a Delaware corporation, obviously because that's where most companies who want to shield their true identities choose to file and/or incorporate.

Coulda Been Worse LLC is an LLC rather than a Political Action Committee, like the one that Beto started and that pays him a salary for trying to get himself elected to seemingly every available position from state rep, to president, to the U.S. Senate to Governor of Texas. It's an LLC because, if a political action committee, it would have to register with the Texas Ethics Commission. Part of the Texas definition of a "political committee" includes: "two or more persons acting in concert with a principal purpose of accepting political contributions or making political expenditures." Unless some wrongdoing can be uncovered, being a Delaware LLC shields them from the scrutiny of the Ethics Commission and puts no caps on the amount they spend.

And spend they have. Within days of having the formal LLC a done deal, it surfaced via a media tracking firm, AdImpact, that Coulda Been Worse LLC was buying up commercial time across Texas. So far, that we know of, it has purchased $6.1 million in ads that are to run from September 9 through October 9. Wouldn't surprise me at all if more buys are made for additional commercials to run after October 9...or even additional ads during that one-month block if space opens up.

Advertising orders like that have to be filed with the Federal Communications Commission. So a tiny bit more info surfaced there than from Delaware. Coulda Been Worse LLC showed an Arlington, Virginia, address; bought the ads via a company called Icon International in Connecticut; and Coulda Been Worse LLC identifies a name too common to search as its executive director: Michael Waters.

Shortly after the ads began, Beto was asked about them at a campaign stop in Lockhart. His response was that he had no idea who Coulda Been Worse LLC is.

Uh huh.

Maybe I should have gone into politics. I mean, some stranger you don't know, who has never contacted you, who you aren't beholden to for anything, just ups and spends a minimum of $6.1 million on your behalf while shielding their identity behind a Delaware LLC? Sounds like a sweet gig to me.

Since, other than his stints in local politics and as a state representative, Beto--excuse me, Robert Francis--has only ever had one other paying job, working for his mother's furniture store, I'm sure that sweet-gig promise is what appealed to him, too.

What I smell all over Coulda Been Worse LLC, and it smells rancid, is George Soros.

The Annoyed Man wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 4:35 pm

(Just a "pssst" from the peanut gallery. I think your SSL cert is expired. Can see the image if I change the URL to http only. Now I'll go back to bothering other people...)

LDB415 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 8:32 am There will be far more than enough woke leftists voting for Butto to make it too close for comfort.

We think Sheila Jackson Lee is an embarrassment to Houston. If Beto gets elected we will have much more than an embarrassment. Texas will become a cesspool for Soros pay-for-play influence and political puppeteering, we'll have a total incompetent in Austin who's never really worked a day in his life, and Texas will be an absolute laughing stock.

srothstein wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 10:00 pm

Rafe wrote: ↑Wed Aug 10, 2022 11:04 am Now threatening to impact and influence Texas state sovereign elections, Adams has climbed onboard the Beto bus (pun intended):

Mayor Eric Adams of New York on Tuesday wrote:"I already called all of my friends in Texas and told them how to cast their vote, and I am deeply contemplating taking a bus load of New Yorkers to go to Texas and do some good old-fashioned door knocking because, for the good of America, we have to get him out of office."

We saw this and were talking about it in the office today. The general consensus was that no self-respecting Texan would ever take any advice from a New York carpet-bagger on who to vote for (or much else).

We were wondering if we could buy the rights to the old Pace commercial and take out an ad on NYC TV to say what Adams said and then play the clip where they say "New York City? Git a rope". I wonder how many he would get to volunteer.

Ha! Good one! I remember those ads. Wait... Now I have to give YouTube a look...

I wish I'd made better note of who the guest was, but yesterday afternoon on Fox they had on a (don't trust me on this; I'm going entirely from memory) a former president of the National Border Patrol Council talking about the NY bussing business. He was steamed. This is probably a terrible paraphrasing of what he said (I'll the actual video clip if I ever find it; couldn't locate it just now):

A bad paraphrase from memory of yesterday's interview wrote: The New York and DC mayors don't understand how it works. We, the CPB, take illegal crossings into custody. They fill out paperwork about who they are, where they were born, where they're coming from, and where in the United States they're going to. Under current federal directives, after we process them they're turned over to one of the NGOs involved, and those NGOs work with them from there. At that point, they are not detained and are free to go anywhere they want.

You'd think from the rhetoric in New York and DC that Governor Abbott is pointing to random people and ordering them onto a bus. That isn't what's happening at all. Abbott is using Texas state funding to pay for bus trips, but it's the NGOs who are working with the immigrants, seeing who has written "New York" or Washington DC" on their intake forms as being their final U.S. destination, and then asking who among those would like to take the free bus trip. They're finding our who wants to go there. Almost none of them have the means to get there on their own. Look at the videos. Do any of those people look like they were forced on a bus? You see them disembarking in New York smiles all around because that's where they wanted to go when they paid the coyotes, and Texas has paid for them to make that 1,950-mile journey on a nice, safe, comfortable, air-conditioned bus.

New York is the biggest city in the country. It has thousands of recent immigrants. A good number of the people crossing the Rio Grande have family in and around New York. That's one reason so many want to go there. And besides, New York and DC have proudly proclaimed themselves to be sanctuary cities. Just like Biden's open border policies have been a magnet for illegal crossings, cities that have labeled themselves "sanctuary cities" had better understand that they reap what they sow.

And how hypocritic is it to put up a banner about being a sanctuary city and then start whining and asking for federal aid--even the National Guard in DC--when a few busloads of immigrants arrive? A standard motor coach bus can hold about 55 passengers; the very biggest up to 80 passengers. So far in 2022, we've had more border stops than at any equivalent period since we've been keeping records. We've beat 2021, which is no easy feat. The CBP's fiscal year starts in October, and for 2022 so far we've recorded 1.75 million stops at the southern border. All of 2021 was 1.73 million. We had 239,416 encounters in May and 207,416 in June. Del Rio, Texas, has a population of less than 36,000. Brackettville is less than 2,000; Carizo Springs is about 5,500; Uvalde a little over 16,000. Even San Antonio, the largest major city to the border and the second largest city in Texas, has a population of about 1.4 million. The Greater New York Combined Statistical Area has a population of 23.6 million. And since the start of the pandemic, New York City's population is down more than 4%. A lot of people don't feel safe there anymore and have moved. So there's room to be a sanctuary city and take in people who do want to be there.

Who's better equipped to handle the inflow of illegal immigrants? Tiny border towns with tiny budgets and no housing, or a metropolitan area that's larger than 40 of the 50 states? By my count, as of Sunday a total of five busses of immigrants have arrived in New York from Texas. My thought about what Adams is saying is, "A long overdue welcome to the party, pal. Big self-declared sanctuary cities should be getting the majority of the undocumented influx, but you've been happy to sit back and let small border towns be literally overwhelmed with numbers that--every single month, and not counting the half-million or more 'got aways' we've already had in 2022--are more than five times their entire populations. Every single month!

Now threatening to impact and influence Texas state sovereign elections, Adams has climbed onboard the Beto bus (pun intended):

Mayor Eric Adams of New York on Tuesday wrote:"I already called all of my friends in Texas and told them how to cast their vote, and I am deeply contemplating taking a bus load of New Yorkers to go to Texas and do some good old-fashioned door knocking because, for the good of America, we have to get him out of office."

Just like, throughout the current administration to date, neither Biden nor Harris has even bothered to come to the southern border, maybe we need a "Mayors for Community Service" exchange program and have people like Muriel Bowser and Eric Adams--instead of taking a comfy vacation--come spend a week, just one week, in Del Rio working with the NGOs who handle in the influx...and maybe even spend a day or two riding with Customs and Border Patrol agents.

It's a national crisis, people. It isn't a, "Oh, just ignore it; let Texas and Arizona sort it out" problem.

Well, was just on Gov. Abbott's conference call town hall (focus on border security) that started a little after 6:30. Got disconnected, and can't seem to dial back in; get a quick-busy signal. If I had a tinfoil hat nearby, I might think that... Oh, never mind.


But I was looking forward to the Q&A. Will try again in a few minutes. If you want to give it a go, the number is 877-299-5487.