New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday responded to the Texas National Guard installing razor wire along the Rio Grande facing New Mexico.
KRQE’s sister station, KTSM, captured video showing troops putting up concertina wire and fencing on the riverbank in the El Paso, Texas, area Tuesday afternoon. The expansion came three days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott posted on X that the state would triple its razor wire border barriers to “deny illegal entry into our state and our country.”
Gov. Lujan Grisham released the following statement about Texas’ actions:
Gov. Abbott seems to be pushing to make Texas its own country without regard for his neighbors or the fact that Texas is already part of a great nation—the United States. If he doesn’t think that New Mexico is important to the overall well-being of Texas, then he must be forgetting about the Permian Basin and the oil industry that straddles our two states. I don’t see him laying concertina wire there. Gov. Abbott’s latest political stunt at the border will have no meaningful impact on our nation’s broken immigration system. Only Congress can fix our federal immigration laws, and I implore Republicans in Congress to stop holding up the carefully negotiated, bipartisan agreement they are deliberately stalling in Washington at the expense of our entire nation
This is not the first time Texas has acted on concern that illegal smuggling activity going on in New Mexico would spill into Texas. Earlier this year, the state extended its barrier at a spot where the river stops running parallel to Mexico and turns north into New Mexico.
The New Mexico-facing concertina barrier extends from West Paisano Drive to the Texas side of the Anapra, N.M., bridge between El Paso and Sunland Park.
According to Border Report, The Santa Teresa Border Patrol Station in southern New Mexico is one of the busiest in the nation in terms of migrant smuggling activity; many of the 171 encounters with deceased migrants this fiscal year have occurred in the desert near Sunland Park.