Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, has spearheaded a manufactured political crisis over the state of the US-Mexico border for years. Not content to send hundreds of non-consenting migrants to Democrat-run cities by the busload, Abbott’s latest stunts have now brought him into confrontation with the federal government over the border. Jim Hightower and David Griscom return to The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the impact of Abbott’s standoff on border communities and migrants.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the book, “Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow.” He publishes the monthly “Hightower Lowdown,”
David Griscom is a writer and Texan based in Austin and the cohost of the podcast Left Reckoning.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us once again, and welcome to another episode of Rise of the Right. We’re taking ourselves back to Texas. We made a great journey down there, a lot has come out of that, and Texas is all over the news at the moment. There’s a crisis on the border. It’s also a battle for the future of this country being played out right now between the border of Mexico and Texas. Immigration has always been a line of confrontation in our country, and with a powerful racist and right-wing power in Texas at this moment, migration across the border has become a violent flashpoint. It feels like some of the first volleys of a second civil war are being played out right along the border.
There’s a place called Eagle Pass where it is being played out. Abbott, the Texas governor, has mobilized the Texas National Guard, and the state police, put razor wire across the border, and pushed confrontation with the border patrol and the federal government. Immigrants, when they get across the border, Abbott and his people put them on buses and send them into cities run by democratic mayors and dump them off. We’re going to explore that; what that means, where it may be taking us, and what can be done.
We are joined by, once again, the legendary Jim Hightower, who from 1983 to 1991 was the elected commissioner of the Texas Department of Agriculture. He publishes his monthly newsletter, an in-depth investigative reporting called The Hightower Lowdown. Also joining us once again is Dave Griscom, a writer, organizer, wildly-known activist, and co-host of the podcast Left Reckoning. So, let me start with you, Jim. What’s happening at Eagle Pass, what it sets up, and how dangerous at this point it is, do you think?
Jim Hightower: I’ve been to Eagle Pass many times. It’s a very pleasant little town, maybe 25,000 people, something like that. Pleasant cross-border relationship. The Rio Grande is not a divisive border; People cross it all the time, they’re intermarried, they play sports on either side of the border, et cetera, et cetera. So the people of Eagle Pass are a little bit PO’d that their town is being trashed as somehow a horrific battleground that’s extraordinarily dangerous. That is not the situation. The MAGA crowd sent a caravan down a week or so ago to Eagle Pass – It was a part of the Christian Nationalist Movement and they called it Take Our Border Back – They were going to have 700,000 truckloads of people come down, and it ended up that they had 20 trucks, not 700,000, and the whole shebang turned out to be a rambling, babbling speech by Sarah Palin, and Ted Nugent played a song, and about 200 people showed up.
I can tell you that you can get a bigger crowd at a children’s greased pig contest at a county fair here in Texas than 200 people, but it’s a big show. The point is though that they’re trying to create this scene of violence. Some of those 200 who had made the trek several hundred miles to be there were stunned to find that, wait a minute. I don’t see any invasion of hordes of murderous people from Mexico, Latin America, or wherever. It seems pretty peaceful to me. And it is. Not that it’s not a problem, it is a problem, but the problem is a solvable one if people want to solve it rather than doing political stunts.
Marc Steiner: Dave, let me bring you in here. We want Jim to do a tale on that, but I also have a question for you. I was reading a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center that had these recordings on a dashcam of interactions between some of the militia leaders – This guy Michael Meyer and the Veterans on Patrol – And with some members of the Border Patrol sounding like they were coordinating. In the long term, how dangerous is this situation?
David Griscom: Yeah. Following what Jim was saying, I feel like a lot of those folks who went down to the border were a little bit disappointed when they showed up. There were very odd videos of those guys driving around in pickup trucks and circling Mexican restaurants while people were having a nice Saturday/Sunday evening. When it comes to lawlessness at the border, the only thing that I could see was the commotion that these guys were creating. I believe there was also a bank robbery that weekend, no doubt because all the police were doing traffic duty after dealing with all of these guys coming down to the border. At the same time, you don’t want to make too light of this. These guys are strange and odd, but Greg Abbott and the Republican Party are creating a dynamic here where people are hearing orders, and they’re responding. People are driving down the border and harassing folks. So when you create an environment like that, it doesn’t take too much to light that fuse and see something awful happen.
Marc Steiner: I’m going to pick up on this for a minute. On the one hand, they can seem like a bad Laurel and Hardy movie. On the other hand – I look at this, and that’s why I wanted to parse this through with you all, see what the reality is that it could be a harbinger of some really dangerous things happening – You have Texas, which is a politically divided state that has had this very conservative and now very right-wing government that is taking federal law into their own hands of the border, putting up razor wire, shipping people across the country that do cross the border, and maybe setting up a confrontation with the Border Patrol despite some of the interaction that these Texas militias have had with the Border Patrol. Let’s talk about this politically. What does it mean? Let me start there. David, why don’t you jump off on this first, then Jim can jump right back in?
David Griscom: Not just Abbott, but many members of the executive branch are trying to expand the powers of the state of Texas. So you see Greg Abbott in this confrontation with the federal government. We’re also watching this with Ken Paxton who was trying to enforce Texas laws regarding abortion and trans healthcare outside of the state, and trying to chase down people who might’ve left the state to have a medical procedure done to them. So there is this fundamental question that we’re seeing pop up in the Republican Party here which is a confrontation with the federal government.
There are two things that we have to be able to hold in our heads at once: There is a dangerous increase in the willingness of the Republican Party in the state to start to push those boundaries and ask dangerous questions about the role of the state government versus the federal government while also recognizing that in the state of Texas, Greg Abbott has been having this up and down relationship with his own GOP. The Texas GOP is in the middle of a civil war. We saw that with the very recent impeachments against Ken Paxton. You saw them struggle to do certain red-meat policies for the Republican Party like school vouchers.
All at the same time, I know you’ve covered and I’ve written a lot about things like HB 2127 which are direct attempts to strip democracy from the vast majority of Texans. So there’s a dangerous game that’s being played as Abbott, particularly, is trying to put on a show for national politics that creates dangerous downstream effects for migrants and everyday Texans. It’s an interesting thing because Abbott is two things at once: One of the most powerful governors the state of Texas has seen and somebody who’s also very much struggling to whip his own Republican Party in line. And that creates a very dangerous dynamic of wanting to do a lot of spectacle to shore up, support, and project power.
Jim Hightower: Well, you don’t have to be a who’s who to know what’s what, and what’s what is that Greg Abbott is playing political games. Ken Paxton, our indicted attorney general who is under federal investigation, is playing the same game alongside Abbott. They are endangering real people. You mentioned, Marc, that there’s razor wire stretched across the border. The razor wire is in the river; That means you’re going to get caught in it and get gashed. People are having that experience every single day who are trying to cross, who are fleeing their horror. This is an abomination. Abbott, Paxton, and others who support them politically in the legislature, are nasty pieces of work.
Woody Guthrie has a song that he wrote that’s not well-known but it’s very poignant. He says, I’m mean. If I ever did good for somebody, I’m sorry for it. I’m studying to be meaner yet. Well, that’s Greg Abbott. These people aren’t ideological, they’re not even political, they’re just mean bastards. And that’s what’s at play here. The people who live on the border overwhelmingly oppose this assault. The real invasion coming to Eagle Pass is from the North; People coming down there armed and driving their pickups or whatever, full of fury, and thinking that they’re going to war. But they get there and there are no people to hate.
That’s what’s being spread here: An ethic of hatred that has popped up periodically throughout our history along that border. It has never done any good for anybody, including the demagogues who try to make hay out of it. They end up getting caught on their own petard and that’s going to end up being the case here because there’s a logic to what is going on and there are solutions to this mass movement which I certainly agree is a problem; Not just on our border, but in Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and other cities where Abbott, DeSantis, and these political stunt players are sending migrants. They’re playing politics with people’s lives and there’s going to be a comeuppance on that because believe it or not, even in politics, logic and sanity can ultimately prevail.
Marc Steiner: I want to come to the solutions as we conclude this because it’s important for us to get there. We have to have an understanding of what hope is and organize how to confront what we’re faced with. Just yesterday, Alejandro Mayorkas, who is the Homeland Security secretary, was impeached in US Congress, in large part because of what’s happening on the border and what they’re using to get rid of him.
So let’s explore that politically. What these militias and these convoys represent is something larger and deeper that’s infecting the entire body of politics of Texas and the entire country. I don’t think the secretary will be impeached in the Senate, but that’s a huge move. It’s drawing this political line that’s also being drawn in Texas. How do you both see this playing out? It’s been a long time since a Democrat, let alone somebody that leans towards the left, has been elected in Texas and it’s a very divided state. So let’s talk a bit about how you both perceive this playing out politically and what it says for the country as a whole. You can start if you want, Jim, and Dave, leap right in.
Jim Hightower: How it plays out is that this is political gamesmanship. Lily Tomlin once said, that no matter how cynical you get, it’s hard to keep up. That’s what’s at work here. The Mayorkas impeachment is a complete fraud. He’s not impeached according to the constitutional requirement that he be guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors. They didn’t even offer that. They didn’t pretend that. They said they disagreed with him. Therefore, we are going to impeach him. They had to have two runs at it to get that done. Even then, they only did it by one vote. So that’s not exactly a firestorm but I’ll go to my party, the Democratic Party, and say that it has not stood up in the way that it needs to do on the border.
Franklin Roosevelt, when he came into office, got his staff together and said, do something. If it works, do it some more. If it doesn’t work, do something else. That’s what we need. It’s not working, what they’re doing. If I was president, I would mobilize a Border Amigos Corps that would bring lawyers and judges down to clear the caseloads. That’s a huge problem. It’s taking forever, months, for an individual case to proceed. That could be fixed if we set up quick courts and moved thousands of people a day through that system.
I would also have doctors on board, bring in the Doctors Without Borders group that works around the world very effectively to take care of people and show that we’re not a country of hatred and we’re not a country going to exploit very vulnerable migrants, but we’re going to at least see that you don’t die on the border, and then bring in family consultants, et cetera, and move it. Bring the force in to clear this up. It is a humanitarian disaster that is taking place, but it doesn’t have to be. If we’d say, all right. We’re going to fix it, and then do it.
Marc Steiner: David, let me ask you to jump in here as well. What Jim is saying, is you also have the governor of Texas, Abbott, and others in power, A, saying they’re going to start prosecuting immigrants coming across the border. They could be put in jail for up to 20 years. You have the razor wire put down that Texas did. Texas saying it has the constitutional right to protect its borders, arrest people, and put the razor wire down. So even though this convoy petered out, this is something bigger than just the convoy. Something is erupting here, and it’s erupting on the right having power in places like Texas and doing the things that I’ve just described they’re doing. A, talk a bit about that, and B, how do you fight back?
David Griscom: Yeah. First of all, it’s exceptionally clear that Greg Abbott’s strategy here hasn’t done very much to slow immigration. On that level, if I was a conservative Republican, that would be something that you could say. That we’re spending a lot of money at the border right now effectively running a parallel operation to the federal government, spending a lot of Texas money on this. Also, Abbott can go on Fox News and talk about how he’s tough on the border. It’s a waste of our money, it’s extremely dangerous, and it’s also not effective.
I don’t share their goals here but by their logic, what Abbott is saying he wants to do, it’s not effective. On the larger thing, when it comes to taking this issue on, I love Jim’s idea of having an Amigo Corps going down to the border and I wish we were seeing more proposals like that coming from the Democratic Party. What’s frightening to me is that under Joe Biden, despite all of the attacks he’s been getting from the right, Joe Biden has been following similar, brutal border politics and even this bipartisan deal that they were pushing.
Of course the Republicans didn’t go for it because it’s a loser for them. But also, the idea that the Democratic Party is going to beat the Republican Party by being crueler on the border is politically wrong. It’s also morally wrong. We’re going into the same crisis that the Democratic Party in this state has fallen into many times, and a trap the Democratic Party has fallen into many times on the national level which is, oh, we’re going to beat the Republicans at their own game, and we’re going to say we’re tougher than the Republicans on immigration.’
That’s an absolute loser as a political strategy and is morally wrong to boot. One of the things that needs to be made exceptionally clear is that you have to have a response to what’s going on at the border. That doesn’t mean troops, that doesn’t mean being brutal, it means helping people get settled who are entering into this country, giving them medical care that they need, giving them the ability to get where they need to go. Remember, for people who want to see different politics in a different economy in this country, this immigration stuff doesn’t stop at the Texas border.
The fear of getting deported, the fear of having your family get deported, and the fear of getting pushed out of your home are things that are utilized all across this country to brutalize folks. As I know y’all cover a lot on The Real News Network, all these horrific stories of undocumented children working at places like meatpacking facilities. This is used by bosses all across the country to instill fear in people of being deported or being harassed by the government, and we need to come up with a sensible solution so we don’t have an underclass of people in this country – Adults and children – Working in fear and under dangerous conditions.
Marc Steiner: I want to digress on something for a moment because it’s something you’ve both said. When you look at the history of immigration in the US, there’s always been a battle not to allow immigrants in, this movement to say no to other people coming across the border, and it happened to my grandparents who came in from Eastern Europe. I remember my grandfather talking to me about his experience coming into the Port of Baltimore. He didn’t go to Ellis Island, they came to the Port of Baltimore where they had to go through all these inspections, health checks, and the rest, and he spoke very little English at that time.
As horrendous as that was, there was a system that worked, that allowed people – Whom many Americans did not want to come into the country – To come in the country without visas, without passports, and become productive citizens of the US. So how do you think that you get to a place where that becomes part of the battle to fight against what’s going on at the border? Before I get to the razor wire, which I’ll get to in a minute, how does that happen? How do people like yourselves, other people, and other Texans organize and confront the power that wants to take us back to a very venal place?
Jim Hightower: You come right out and say that again, and again, and again. By the way, that is being said all across Texas and not just in the so-called “liberal centers” of Austin, Houston, Dallas, and El Paso; It’s throughout the state that people are fairly commonsensical about it and they know the absurdity of what the Republicans are doing and Democrats going along with it and playing right to it. One thing that also needs to be included in this is to make the Border Patrol our friends instead of casting them as the enemy, which some of them have been. Instead, let’s put real money in so that we’ve got an adequate border presence, real money into training who they are, and most importantly, give them a positive role to play so that they’re not just people standing there with guns and stretching barbed wire in the river to snag people who are trying to cross for their humanitarian reasons, but that they become part of the solution.
Then I would add one other thing: This is not just on the border. This approach that Abbott and them are taking, they’re trying to replay the Civil War. They want to go back to the pre-Civil War period in which a few elites ran things and they’re doing that right now with abortion. We’ve passed the most Draconian abortion bill, Abbott and Paxton being leaders in that, in the country. Yeah. Even in cases of rape and incest, you cannot get a legal abortion, and so people are fleeing the state to get the abortions or to get the healthcare that they have to have. So, what have they done? They’ve come up. They’re trying to outlaw the use of public roads, that you cannot drive on the public roads of Texas to go to New Mexico to get the medical services that you need. This is a level of insanity and the right-wing tyranny that these people represent. So we’ve got to go at the heart of it. Are we going to approach this as human beings of goodwill, or are we going to try to make enemies of everybody that we possibly can?
Marc Steiner: Dave, you can pick up on that if you would. When you also look at what Jim was saying and look at it in the context of other governors willing to send in the National Guard, of the militias coming into Texas, and the razor wire that he will not take down. Saying it’s our right to do so is setting up, in some ways, a civil war scenario in this country with Texas playing a leading role. So pick up what Jim was saying. And how do you think you organize against that for something different?
David Griscom: Yeah, yeah. There’s no doubt about it that people are playing with fire. I will say that I wished that the Biden administration would’ve had a little bit more backbone earlier with this. People might forget that this has been going on for a while. There are a million arguments you can make about, for example, putting razor wire on the border. The first challenge was that they didn’t consult the Army Corps of Engineers. I don’t know, it felt a little weak to me. You had Greg Abbott negotiating with the governors of Mexico. So not only is he trying to do his own border policy, but he’s dipping his tone to doing foreign policy. He was doing that last year. So I wish there had been more fight earlier on.
The Biden administration made a wrong calculation that if they ignore this guy, this is going to go away. Now, it started to boil into a dangerous place. Remember too, when it comes to what Abbott is doing, he’s somebody who has made a political career out of operating in that gray legal space where the law is interpretable. He did that with Operation Lone Star from the get-go where he was using COVID money to fund that. Despite the fact that he declared the COVID emergency over, he was continuing to declare disaster declarations in the state so that he could re-portion money. This is how he operates. When you’re watching what he’s doing with the defying the Supreme Court, he’s operating from this grade school like well, you didn’t explicitly say that I’m not allowed to do any more of this kind of thing.
There’s an important thing to remember, that this is an extremely dangerous game. Abbott is trying to operate in that space before it boils over into something that he can’t back down from, but that’s no reason to sit there and let them play this game because it’s extremely dangerous and it doesn’t take much to push this over the edge. When it comes to fighting this, it has to be a political solution and there has to be a lot more courage from people in this state. There are a lot of people doing great work – I’m never one of these people to say that that’s not happening – But there needs to be a way that we talk about the border that is a little bit different.
So much of the Democratic Party in this state – And I’d also argue, nationally, especially in places that are run by Republicans – Is to point at Republicans and say, look how bad they are, look how bad they are. Look, they’re bad, and that works for a lot of folks, but it’s not working enough. One of the biggest victories for the Republican Party, one of the issues that they run on time, and time again is the border. I don’t think that deep in people’s hearts they want this brutality, but what people will say is something along the lines of like, well, at least they’re doing something when they’re talking about the GOP.
The Democrats have plans and things like that but they need to go out there and convince people that there is a humane strategy that is deeper than just saying, hey, we’re not going to do what the Republicans are doing, we actually want to do a humane program to help get people set up in this country. We’re not going to have people living in the shadows in this country, we’re not going to have mothers dying crossing over the Rio Grande. And be able to hold that space because right now, the Republicans are able to say, hey, look. You might not like our techniques, it might be a little ugly, but we get things done. It’s extremely heartbreaking and dangerous and it wouldn’t have to be this way if there was a stronger vision coming from the opposition here.
Jim Hightower: I’ll add that there’s a final step in their right-wing nutballism, too, which is that Texas should secede from the union. Going back to their Civil War mission, I noticed that Abbott and Paxton were not calling for that because the rest of the country would rise and applaud the secession of Texas. The greater danger is that the other states will get together and expel Texas from the union.
Marc Steiner: When you do have these right-wing militias in Texas, that are patrolling the border, the razor wire that the federal government has to find a way to have the gumption to tear it out and tear it down, what would the average response be? We don’t even know if the federal government had the guts to do it. I wonder if you could both paint a picture here of where you think this is going to take us. Jim, when you were elected Agriculture Commissioner, it was on the cusp of when the right was pushing power in Texas, and you ran as a very open, progressive populist when you ran in Texas. So talk about, both of you, where you see the political struggle going in Texas at this moment, what is successful about the rest of the country, and what we may face. Do you want to start, Jim, since I called your name out? Then, Dave, please close it out for us.
Jim Hightower: To me, it’s not about what the Republicans are going to do. They’re going to do the same thing they always do and that they are doing now. Rather, it’s where are the Democrats? What are we going to do? Dave is right. You can’t point and say, well, the other guys are so bad. Truly, they are. They’re worse than bad actually, but that is not a program. A program is saying, we’re going to put the money, the effort, and the dignity of the people of America on the line down there on the border, we’re going to work with the other countries that are causing the influx into our country, and we’re going to come up with a program that will clear the border problem.
The people who are amassing down there, don’t want to stay. They don’t want to be there. They want a decent life. It’s why they’re there, and we should welcome that and make that possible, but only by restoring order to it. As you indicated when your parents came across, there was a system, and it worked. We don’t have a system. In fact, we’ve torn down the system, and then we cry, but the system is broken. Well, we broke it. Put it back together.
Marc Steiner: Dave, I’m curious, where do you see this going? I was thinking about how you see people like Abbott bringing in the National Guard, the militias happening, and other right-wing governors saying, we’ll bring our National Guard to you to confront the stuff on the border. The razor wire. How do you see the future going and how do you organize against it for a different vision of where Texas and the nation could be?
David Griscom: Yeah. I hate to be pessimistic. I think it’s going to get worse for a little while. What we’ve seen in the response from the Democratic Party in particular makes me very worried about what this is going to look like. Colin Allred, who’s running in the Democratic primary to be the Democratic Senate candidate going up against Cruz, basically came out and condemned Biden’s border policies from the right. He’s run up against Roland Gutierrez, but there’s a lot of money behind him, and that to me shows that there still is a pretty large segment or power base within the Democratic Party in this state, and nationally too, that wants to pursue the strategy of outflanking the Republicans and trying to do some version of a right-wing border policy. That’s really scary and dangerous.
How do we fight back against it? At the end of the day, going back to what I’ve been saying is holding on to a vision that is not just morally better, but it’s also mobilizing and motivating people. South Texas is still a very strong Democratic part of the state. But we’ve been seeing some of those districts – A decent amount because of gerrymandering, but also, just because there has been a shift within certain populations of the Hispanic community in South Texas – Voting for the Republican Party. If you go and you talk to folks, and you really investigate why, it’s because, for example, that’s a part of the state that has been under-invested in for a really long time in Texas’ history; And it’s been under-invested in on the national level and the state level, and you have a program like the Border Patrol which can give you a nice job.
We have to be thinking like that to not tie employment or a better life for folks to brutalize people at the border. What we have to be able to do is to think, how can we think of programs that can work to meet this historic need that we’re seeing at the border, this humanitarian need of people coming into this country who need healthcare, care, need abilities to get set up? Go to where they want to go. Hell, what DeSantis and Abbott are doing is so disgusting with these buses, tricking people and sending them into a parking lot in Massachusetts is an evil thing to do. A very humanitarian thing to do would be somebody comes across the border, you give them the medical care that they need, you say, hey, where would you like to go, and you set somebody up in Massachusetts, Oregon, or wherever it is that they want to go where they can get set up with jobs, employment, and that kind of thing.
That would be a jobs program in the sense of, one, helping out migrants and two, helping out people in those local communities get employment, doing a good thing for society, for the state, and the country. When it comes to what the right wing is promising, the right-wing is promising more harassment, more brutality, more violence, and more chaos. What the left should be able to do is say, hey, we are pushing for more humanitarianism for a better life for you and people coming into this country, and for a stronger social vision for what life is like in the border communities, or the entire state of Texas, or the nation. You have to be able to beat them with concrete visions of programs and organizations that will help improve their life and improve other people’s lives instead of just saying, yeah, these guys are really bad. You have to be able to promise people something that is going to make their lives better. That’s the promise of politics, at least on our side, is that we’re offering people a better life than the one that they have right now. That is going to have to be the cornerstone of any political messaging to deal with this.
Marc Steiner: I want to thank both of you. I know you’re busy men, and I do appreciate you taking the time today. I want to remind our listeners that very shortly, you’ll be hearing them again along with others in our production that came out for our journey to Texas to begin to learn more about this story, what’s happening on the border, what’s happening in Texas in general, and what it says for the future of the nation. That will be coming up very shortly in the next couple of weeks, so look for that. I look forward to giving you all that. I want to thank both of you for joining us here today. Jim Hightower and David Griscom, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you both. Thank you for the work you do and thank you so much for being with us today.
Jim Hightower: Thank you.
David Griscom: Yeah. Seriously, thank you.
Marc Steiner: Once again, thank you to Jim Hightower and David Griscom for joining us today. We’ll be linking to their work on the site here. Coming up in the next couple of weeks, we’ll hear a special report from Texas featuring the people you heard today and other activists who are organizing and taking on the fight for the future. It’s a very critical report and we look forward to sharing that with you in the coming week. Once again, I want to thank you all for joining us today, and thanks to David Hebden here for running this show and editing this program, the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible.
As I said, we’ll link to the work of Jim Hightower and David Griscom here on our site at The Real News Network. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I will write to you right back and create a dialogue. Stay tuned for more conversations about Texas, the rise of the right, and what we can do to secure our future. So, for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, support The Real News, and take care.
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