Under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ leadership, illegal border crossings have skyrocketed. Border states like California, Arizona, and Texas have been overrun with illegal immigrants.
Some states have taken matters into their own hands to deal with the border crisis, including enacting legislation that allows police to arrest illegal aliens.
Now, one state has begun buying land near the border to move forward with efforts to secure the border, such as building a wall.
This week, Fox News reported that the state of Texas has acquired 1,400 acres along the Rio Grande to secure the border. This particular area is prone to human trafficking, weapons smuggling, and drug smuggling (via Fox News):
The Texas General Land Office (GLO) has acquired the ranch in Starr County, in Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Sector, which saw some of the highest levels of migrant traffic. The state will now use that land to build additional border wall.
In an interview with Fox News, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham explained that the Texas Facilities Commission, responsible for building the wall, requested the property.
"They said, ‘Look, it's in the main area of where we're seeing the traffic across the border. We have terrible things happening on this piece of property. The current owner is not only blocking the border wall, but she is blocking law enforcement's access to that property,'" Buckingham said.
"And to really get complete operational control of the border, we really need to control this piece of ground.’ So we made her an offer. We found a way to purchase her ranch from her,” she added.
"It's at an area of great impact, it's in an area where we see lots of people coming across all of the time, not only seeing the people coming across, but seeing those women and children who are abused and victimized. We're seeing drugs. We're seeing weapons. We're seeing all kinds of things coming across this particular part of the border," she said. "In fact, when we were touring it [Thursday], lots of trash everywhere. You can tell there have been a lot of people through there. So we think that this barrier, this wall that the Texas Facilities Commission will build, will help to control that traffic and hopefully shut it down,” Buckingham continued.
Earlier this year, Texas rancher told reporters that he was open to the idea of allowing Texas to construct a border wall on his property.
As Townhall covered, Dr. Gary Schwarz’s house in the Rio Grande Valley was broken into last year. And, his adult son was attacked by individuals in a group of illegal aliens. Not to mention, his fence has sustained lots of damage from the illegal aliens.
“Our problems have been a lot of problems at night where they’re crossing our fences and they’re either cutting our fences and we lose our valuable animals or crawl over them and just literally so many people crawling over and they knock your fences down. That’s a big problem,” he said.
