Greg Abbott Says Texas Border is Solved—Is He Right?

On August 27, Texas Governor Greg Abbott claimed the state’s issue with migrants coming across the southern border from Mexico had been “solved” during an interview with NewsNation’s Ali Bradley.
The Republican governor has poured substantial resources into Operation Lone Star, a program he launched in 2021 in a bid to control migration. The operation has seen large quantities of razor wire and other barriers installed along the Texas-Mexico border, with floating buoys used to block crossing of the Rio Grande. At times the governor has clashed with the Biden administration, including in January when he invoked the state’s “right to self-defense” after the Supreme Court ruled federal agents could remove razor wire installed on the governor’s orders.
During his NewsNation interview, Abbott took credit for the recent fall in encounters across Texas, saying: “We’ve solved the Texas problem, but the United States problem—that requires a new president to make sure that we are actually going to secure our border.”
Abbott added: “Let’s look at the timeline, because you will remember that Joe Biden put his so-called executive order in place where he helped to close the border in June. But if you go back and look at when border crossings began to decline, that was more than a half a year before that, back in last December, and that was after Texas had begun our accelerated operations to deny illegal entry, using the guard, using the razor wire, using the pepper ball.
“It was the robust, comprehensive approach by Texas that actually led to the decline. Biden just happened to come in and stepped and rode on our coattails.”
Newsweek has spoken to multiple immigration experts and looked at official figures to assess Abbott’s claim. Newsweek also contacted Abbott for comment via email.
According to an Newsweek analysis of recent U.S. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) migrant encounter figures the number of interactions between law enforcement and suspected illegal migrants along the Texas-Mexico border has indeed declined sharply in recent months. In May 2024 the figure was 78,068, the lowest it had been since 65,337 in February 2021.
The CBP figure for suspected illegal migrant encounters in Texas, calculated by combining data for the federal agency’s Rio Grande Valley, Laredo, Del Rio, Big Bend and El Paso sectors, showed a sharp drop at the start of this year from 158,221 in December 2023 to 76,558 in January 2024. This tracked a broader fall across the entire southern border over the same period, including CBP sectors in Arizona and California. Overall migrant encounters along the Mexican border went from 301,981 in December 2023 to 176,196 the following month.
The migrant encounter figures have fluctuated substantially over the past few years, with Texas recording a 2020s high of 164,314 in September 2023 when the figure for the entire southern border was 269,735. By comparison in June 2023 both figures were much lower, with 80,756 encounters recorded in Texas and 144,556 for the southern border as a whole.
Encounters increased substantially during the first few months of 2021, which coincided with President Biden terminating a Trump era travel ban and ending an emergency declaration used to guarantee funds for a border wall immediately after his inauguration in January.
In January 2021 the CBP recorded 51,148 migrant encounters in Texas and 78,414 across the southern border as a whole, and by March of that year those figures had ballooned to 119,665 for Texas and 178,795 for the southern border in its entirety.
However, Professor Roberto Suro, an expert in migration into the U.S. who taught at the University of Southern California, questioned Abbott’s claim to be behind the recent fall in suspected illegal migrant encounters in Texas.
“Abbott has not ‘solved’ anything. Migrant encounters are down all across the Southwest Border, and the reasons don’t have anything to do with Texas,” Suro told Newsweek.
“First the government of Mexico started turning people back before they even got to the border, bringing the numbers down at the start of the year. And then in June the Biden administration took executive action that severely restricted access to the asylum system. Abbott has been playing politics with migration all along, still is.”
The fall in U.S. migrant encounters has coincided with a surge in migrant apprehensions in Mexico, which soared to 120,005 in January and 119,943 in February, although the number deported was substantially lower. According to the Washington Office on Latin America, a U.S. based human rights group, this crackdown came shortly after Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas visited Mexico City in December 2023.
In June, President Biden signed an executive order which would effectively halt the number of migrants able to claim asylum after crossing the southern border if the overall figure surpassed 2,500 per day over a seven-day average.
As part of his effort to draw attention to illegal immigration Abbott has been bussing migrants to Democratic run cities since April 2022.
Since launching the plan in 2022, 120,000 migrants were transported to cities including Chicago, New York, Washington, D.C., and Denver according to Abbott’s office.
According to figures from the governor’s office, over this period around 49,500 migrants were bussed from Texas to New York City, 30,800 to Chicago, 19,200 to Denver, 12,500 to Washington, D.C., and 1,500 to Los Angeles. Newsweek understands that as of August 28 the last migrant bus to Denver arrived on June 11, with the city’s emergency shelters for migrants having emptied.
A spokesperson for Mike Johnston, Denver’s Democratic mayor, said Biden was behind a decline in the number of irregular migrants arriving in the city. “The numbers are night and day since President Biden’s order took effect,” he told Newsweek.
Abbott vowed to continue his policy of bussing migrants to Democratic controlled cities at the Republican National Convention which took place in Milwaukee between July 15 and July 18. Addressing delegates he said: “We have continued busing migrants to sanctuary cities all across the country. Those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border.”
According to CNN, Texan authorities have spent around $150 million bussing migrants out of the state. Democratic New York City Mayor Eric Adams in January launched a lawsuit seeking $700 million from 17 companies which he claimed had been involved in transporting migrants from Texas to his city.
According to Joshua Black, a political scientist who serves as director of research for the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, Abbott’s border control policies remain popular in the state and are unlikely to change anytime soon.
Speaking to Newsweek he said: “Given the billions of dollars that the state has spent on operation lone star for state sponsored border security operations, it would require a high level of verbal acrobatics for Abbott not to claim some kind of success.
“At the same time, there’s been no appetite on the part of voters, or elected officials, for Texas to dial back its efforts, so expect the issue to reemerge—if it ever really goes away—as soon as seasonal, and other, migration patterns increase crossings, yet again, at the Texas border.”