Perry, Dewhurst Take Unearned Credit for Drop in Migrant Crossings

When troopers with the Department of Public Safety first started deploying to the border in June, DPS made clear that they weren’t going to be taking any part in enforcing immigration laws. DPS—much like the forthcoming National Guard deployment—would be on the border solely to assist with law enforcement efforts, like cracking down on drug smugglers. Gov. Rick Perry and others agreed: The deployments were about crime, not the migrants themselves.

But now apprehensions are apparently declining on part of the Texas border, and Texas lawmakers are eager to take credit, even there’s no evidence that the drop in apprehensions has anything to do with Texas’ border surge. To the contrary, the most likely explanations have to do with factors far out of the hands of Texas government. State lawmakers are also changing their story; now the border operations are about immigration enforcement, not stopping drug runners and traffickers.

Gov. Rick Perry was one of the first to take credit for the drop in apprehensions. At his press conference on July 21 announcing the deployment of the National Guard, he credited DPS for staunching the flow. “Apprehensions have dropped 36 percent, from more than 6,600 per week, to 4,200 per week,” Perry said. “This is a clear indication that the increased patrol presence” of DPS and other law enforcement efforts is “having a deterrent effect.”

(I asked Perry’s office for the source of the figures, and the office referred me to DPS. I’ll update when I hear back.)

But last week, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst went much further. On Friday morning, Dewhurst joined Fox News host Bill Hemmer to talk about the border crisis—but an ebullient Dewhurst had one thing in particular he wanted to say.

“As a result of our surge with our state police, Bill, over the last five weeks, we’ve been able to shut down and reduce illegal immigration” in a 60-mile stretch of the “Rio Grande Valley by some 50 percent,” he said. It was a great success, he said, even though the reduction had come at a cost of “$17 or $18 million a month” and the Texas-Mexico border is 1,254 miles long.

More at http://www.texasobserver.org/rick-perry-dewhurst-take-unearned-credit-for-drop-in-migrant-crossings/ .