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Service Quality and Reputation
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Update –> There is a BIG mess going on in DC about how ‘crack pipes’ are part of the ‘safe smoking kits’….HHS Secretary and the White House are saying that crack pipes are not included in the distribution…yeah okay…but hold on fact checkers….upon doing more checking seems our own government was funding a crack pipe study in Mexico….you know that Dr. Fauci agency….now we may know where this all started.
This is the screenshot in case it goes away…giggles:
When government become an illicit drug distributor….a bridge too far?
Source: In the name of harm reduction, the substance abuse arm of the Health and Human Services Agency will begin providing funds to help distribute “safe smoking kits” for the consumption of various illicit drugs like crack cocaine and crystal meth.
The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA) has allocated roughly $30 million for a Harm Reduction Program Grant, which includes funding for syringe exchange programs, the opioid reversal drug naloxone, test kits to detect fentanyl and “safe smoking kits/supplies,” among other more traditional measures, like HIV testing and safer sex resources.
A grant program funded by the Biden administration will furnish syringes and “safe smoking kits” among other items as a means to advancing equity.
The deadline for the $30 million program is Monday, with the Department of Health and Human Services distributing funds to nonprofit groups and local governments. Among the items the grant will pay for are syringes and “safe smoking kits/supplies.”The kits will allow users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and other illicit substances. source
*** Per the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) website, the top paragraph reads –>
The Drug Enforcement Administration enforces the United States’ controlled substance laws and regulations and aims to reduce the supply of and demand for such substances.
How does the Department of Justice of which the DEA is the authority square with this exactly? We now have local, state and the Federal governments contributing to the drug epidemic problem plaguing the whole country. Policymakers are just nuts and exactly how is this objective contributing to a positive outcome?
Article continues (…)
Harm reduction efforts, like testing for infectious diseases, needle exchanges and naloxone distribution programs, are nothing new, but providing federal taxpayer funds for paraphernalia used to smoke drugs is.
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Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for adults 18-45 and this is how the Biden admin is responding: https://t.co/rI6DxzazTv
An HHS spokesperson reportedly confirmed to The Washington Free Beacon these “safe smoking kits” will provide pipes for the consumption of “any illicit substance” to reduce the risk of infection, which can potentially occur through cuts and sores.
Seattle previously distributed meth pipes to residents in 2015, according to Reuters, but it’s reportedly hard to tell the benefit such a program can have.
“It is plausible the intervention could be effective,” said Matthew Golden, a Seattle and King County disease control official and a University of Washington medical professor, when the program was launched. “It’s simply an unstudied idea.”
One nonprofit said it had conducted research which determined meth users would be less likely to inject the drug if given access to pipes, but there is little evidence to back up such a claim, Reuters reported.
San Francisco has handed out crack pipes as well, according to local reporting, where allegedly an estimated 25,000 people actively inject drugs.
The SAMHSA grant’s $30 million will be spread across three years, and the money will be prioritized for “underserved communities that are greatly impacted by substance use disorder (SUD).”
Other measures funded by the grant include harm reduction vending machines – including the contents to stock them, infectious disease test kits and medicines, vaccination services and wound care supplies.
The National Desk reached out to SAMHSA to see if the “safe smoking kits” will also be available at harm reduction vending machines across the country but did not receive an immediate response in time for publication. This story will be updated if a response is obtained.
The Windows maker’s Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) is tracking the cluster under the moniker ACTINIUM (previously as DEV-0157), sticking to its tradition of identifying nation-state activities by chemical element names.
The Ukrainian government, in November 2021, publicly attributed Gamaredon to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and connected its operations to the FSB Office of Russia in the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. Details.
The Gamaredon APT was first spotted in 2013 and in 2015, when researchers at LookingGlass shared the details of a cyber espionage operation tracked as Operation Armageddon, targeting other Ukrainian entities. Their “special attention” on Eastern European countries was also confirmed by CERT-UA, the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team.
The discovered attack appears to be designed to lure military personnel: it leverage a legit document of the “State of the Armed Forces of Ukraine” dated back in the 2nd April 2019. Source
For this reason, Cybaze-Yoroi ZLAB team dissected this suspicious sample to confirm the possible link with Russian threat actors.
***
There are several outside government cyber experts that are reporting much the same as Microsoft as noted here.
Source: While Gamaredon has mainly targeted Ukrainian officials and organizations in the past, the group attempted an attack on January 19 that aimed to compromise a Western government “entity” in Ukraine, researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 organization reported Thursday. Gamaredon leadership includes five Russian Federal Security Service officers, the Security Service of Ukraine said previously.
Microsoft threat researchers released their own findings on Gamaredon in the blog post today, disclosing that the group has been actively involved in malicious cyber activity in Ukraine since October 2021.
While the hacker group has been dubbed “Gamaredon” by Unit 42, Microsoft refers to the group by the name “Actinium.”
“In the last six months, MSTIC has observed ACTINIUM targeting organizations in Ukraine spanning government, military, non-government organizations (NGO), judiciary, law enforcement, and non-profit, with the primary intent of exfiltrating sensitive information, maintaining access, and using acquired access to move laterally into related organizations,” the threat researchers said in the post. “MSTIC has observed ACTINIUM operating out of Crimea with objectives consistent with cyber espionage.”
Evading detection
Tactics used frequently by the group include spear-phishing emails with malicious macro attachments, resulting in deployment of remote templates, the researchers said. By causing a document to load a remote document template with malicious code—the macros—this “ensures that malicious content is only loaded when required (for example, when the user opens the document),” Microsoft said.
“This helps attackers to evade static detections, for example, by systems that scan attachments for malicious content,” the researchers said. “Having the malicious macro hosted remotely also allows an attacker to control when and how the malicious component is delivered, further evading detection by preventing automated systems from obtaining and analyzing the malicious component.”
The Microsoft researchers report that they’ve observed numerous email phishing lures used by Gamaredon, including those that impersonate legitimate organizations, “using benign attachments to establish trust and familiarity with the target.”
In terms of malware, Gamaredon uses a variety of different strains—the most “feature-rich” of which is Pterodo, according to Microsoft. The Pterodo malware family brings an “ability to evade detection and thwart analysis” through the use of a “dynamic Windows function hashing algorithm to map necessary API components, and an ‘on-demand’ scheme for decrypting needed data and freeing allocated heap space when used,” the researchers said.
Meanwhile, the PowerPunch malware used by the group is “an agile and evolving sequence of malicious code,” Microsoft said. Other malware families employed by Gamaredon include ObfuMerry, ObfuBerry, DilongTrash, DinoTrain, and DesertDown.
‘Very agile threat’
Gamaredon “quickly develops new obfuscated and lightweight capabilities to deploy more advanced malware later,” the Microsoft researchers said. “These are fast-moving targets with a high degree of variance.”
Payloads analyzed by the researchers show a major emphasis on obfuscated VBScript (Visual Basic Script), a Microsoft scripting language. “As an attack, this is not a novel approach, yet it continues to prove successful as antivirus solutions must consistently adapt to keep pace with a very agile threat,” the researchers said.
Unit 42 had reported Thursday that Gamaredon’s attempted attack against a western government organization in January involved a targeted phishing attempt.
Instead of emailing the malware downloader to their target, Gamaredon “leveraged a job search and employment service within Ukraine,” the Unit 42 researchers said. “In doing so, the actors searched for an active job posting, uploaded their downloader as a resume and submitted it through the job search platform to a Western government entity.”
Due to the “steps and precision delivery involved in this campaign, it appears this may have been a specific, deliberate attempt by Gamaredon to compromise this Western government organization,” Unit 42 said in its post.
Unit 42 has said it’s not identifying or further describing the western government entity that was targeted by Gamaredon.
No connection to ‘WhisperGate’ attacks
The attempted January 19 attack by Gamaredon came less than a week after more than 70 Ukrainian government websites were targeted with the new “WhisperGate” family of malware.
However, the threat actor responsible for those attacks appears to be separate from Gamaredon, the Microsoft researchers said in the post today. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center “has not found any indicators correlating these two actors or their operations,” the researchers said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last month suggested it’s possible that Russia might be eyeing a cyberattack against U.S. infrastructure, amid tensions between the countries over Ukraine.
Estimates suggest Russia has stationed more than 100,000 troops on the eastern border of Ukraine. On Wednesday, U.S. President Joe Biden approved sending an additional 3,000 U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.
Michelle Wilde bought a piece of sand art during a visit to Jerome, Ariz., earlier this month. Rather than carry it home, she had the shopkeeper ship the $145 frame to her.
Instead of arriving at her home in Everett, Wash., the package ended up next to a railroad track in East Los Angeles. The frame was gone. The box remained.
It was among thousands of boxes recently found littered along Union Pacific Corp. UNP -2.20% tracks in the middle of Los Angeles. Thieves had broken into the train cars and made off with items shipped by Dr. Martens, Harbor Freight Tools and small businesses alike. The scene has set off finger-pointing between the railroad, local officials and police about who is to blame and how to stop a modern twist on one of the country’s oldest crimes.
“Why are people breaking into [railcars] and why is no one doing anything?” Ms. Wilde said, when she was contacted by a Wall Street Journal reporter to inform her of the fate of her package. “We’re like in year 13 of a pandemic so nothing surprises me about human behavior.”
Union Pacific said it has seen a 160% jump in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles since December 2020, including sharper increases in the months leading up to Christmas, when trailers are loaded with inventory bound for stores or gifts shipped to homes. The total losses to Union Pacific, with a market capitalization of $155 billion, have come to $5 million over the past year. That doesn’t include losses tallied by customers shipping on its rails.
Union Pacific has seen a 160% jump in criminal rail theft in Los Angeles since December 2020.
Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
Train robberies date to the dawn of railroads, and Union Pacific has had its share of famous heists. In 1899, Butch Cassidy’s gang robbed the Union Pacific Overland Flyer No. 1 as it passed through Wyoming. The group stopped the train and blew up its safe. A posse was sent out in pursuit of the bandits.
In other parts of the country, thieves occasionally plunder everything from alcohol to appliances from freight trains that either stop or crawl through areas. The railroads combat the problem with their own police forces. Union Pacific has more than 200 police officers, but they must patrol thousands of miles of track across 23 states.
Lance Fritz, Union Pacific’s chief executive officer, said rail theft has been a mostly small-scale problem. What is happening in Los Angeles is different. A couple of years ago, opportunistic individuals might see a mile-plus-long train inching through the city and pry open a car to see what was inside, maybe grab a few items, he said, but “today, that’s more organized.”
A Union Pacific freight train in Los Angeles, where thousands of opened packages are strewn.
Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
The tracks being hit connect to an intermodal Union Pacific rail yard where containers are moved between trucks and trains. The rail corridor carries containers from nearby ports as well as trailers filled with packages from Amazon.com Inc.,FedEx Corp. and United Parcel Service Inc., which are bound for other sorting hubs across the U.S.
This month local news footage showing packages strewn along the tracks went viral. On Thursday, empty packages were still piled on the sidewalks near the rails. As trains rolled by, railcars could be seen with their doors hanging open.
Union Pacific complained in a December letter to Los Angeles officials that they weren’t doing enough to police the area and prosecute individuals caught trespassing.
Adrian Guerrero, a general director of public affairs at Union Pacific, said lenient prosecution means many of those arrested for rifling through railcars have their charges reduced to a misdemeanor or petty offense—and are often quickly released. “We just don’t see the criminal justice system holding these people accountable,” Mr. Guerrero said.
In a letter responding to Mr. Guerrero sent on Friday, Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón said the number of cases submitted to his office in which Union Pacific was listed as the victim had fallen each of the past two years, from 78 cases in 2019 to 47 in 2021. The DA brought charges in 55% of those cases, Mr. Gascón said, with the others dismissed for lack of evidence or because they didn’t involve allegations of burglary, theft or tampering.
“It is very telling that other major railroad operations in the area are not facing the same level of theft at their facilities as UP,” Mr. Gascón wrote. “My Office is not tasked with keeping your sites secure.”
Los Angeles Police Capt. German Hurtado, who works in the Hollenbeck station covering the area, said Union Pacific had downsized its police force in 2020, leaving the company with just six officers patrolling between Yuma, Ariz., and the Pacific coast. Resignations and Covid-19 have also left the LAPD short roughly 2,000 officers, he said, including 50 at his station.
The LAPD has run several task forces around the tracks, he said, and since August has arrested about 125 people for rail-related offenses, including burglary and trespassing.
Union Pacific executives said they have added dozens of agents in recent months to patrol the area in Los Angeles, and are using drones, specialized fencing and trespass detection systems to combat the theft. The railroad said it is also actively looking to hire more officers. “While we have a private police force, they do not supplant the vital need and authority of local law enforcement,” a spokeswoman said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the scene Thursday and helped clean up some of the boxes scattered along the tracks. He touted part of his proposed budget, which would grant $255 million to local law enforcement over the next three years and create a dedicated unit to focus on retail, train and auto theft.
“There’s nothing acceptable about this,” Mr. Newsom said of the thefts. “It looked like a third-world country.”
Jim Foote, the CEO of CSX Corp. , another freight railroad that operates in the eastern U.S., said rail theft elsewhere isn’t as rampant as what he sees happening in Los Angeles. He recalls 20 years ago, while working for Canadian National Railway, there was a similar problem in Chicago. To deal with it, the railroad tried to avoid stopping trains where they were getting ransacked.
“We do everything we can to protect our customer shipments, but if the train stops at the wrong time and the wrong place, the modern-day Jesse James will get you,” Mr. Foote said.
Casey Rowcliffe had ordered a battery for his RV that never showed up. He hadn’t given much thought to his missing package until he saw the viral video showing the littered stretch of tracks in Los Angeles.
“I figured it was stuck in the port or somebody’s got it,” the 45-year-old general contractor said. The location of the battery remains a mystery. But the box with his Bellingham, Wash., address was among those found by a Journal reporter. “Out of all those packages, you picked mine?” Mr. Rowcliffe said.
A FedEx spokeswoman said it has measures in place to discourage theft, including advanced locking mechanisms on railcars. In cases where railcars are tampered with, FedEx works with the railroads to retrieve any shipments they can. A UPS spokesman said it would take a collective response to deter criminals and the company has streamlined the claims process for when there are issues with shipments.
Nellie Bly Kaleidoscopes and Art Glass, the small Arizona shop that sent Ms. Wilde her frame, ships out anywhere from three to 20 packages a day. When notified that its package was found torn open in Los Angeles, the shop reached out to Ms. Wilde, shipped out a replacement and started the claims process.
Anne Miranda, the store’s shipping manager, said it typically only has problems with a handful of shipments a year. “That was before the world went crazy,” she said.
Terrorism appears to have taken on a wider set of definitions and is no longer confined to militant Islam. Seems on the domestic front, there are all kinds of profiles, groups, politics and criminals now in the classification according to the most recent government report.
After the January 6th event in Washington DC, the FBI applied every available human resource and technology to identify potential criminals that they deemed performed a criminal act such as parading. Meanwhile, we have heard little if anything about convictions from all the destruction, death and looting from last summer much less how it continues now with the smash and grabs. It has been reported that the FBI embedded some point people in the J6 Trump rally and that is a common practice with thousands of cases for decades by the FBI, so the did the FBI embed anyone in any of the ANTIFA or BLM or with these large groups across the country doing smash and grabs?
We should have regard for the rank and file FBI and DHS employees but we must challenge management for obvious reasons. Let’s go a little deeper shall we?
The next scandal to be mentioned is the school boards versus parents and the Department of Justice. It is not just about critical race theory, it also includes forced mask wearing and then what else is being taught in the classroom without parental knowledge or consent such as sexual diversity. In fact much of what is taught when it comes to sexual diversity is actually pornography. No one at the Department of Education or the Department of Justice even cares about those violations of laws involving minors.
Simply Americans are being coerced into believing application of the law is fair and equal, that is hardly the case. We have an activist government and it is being propped up by activists in every agency at the Federal level and now we are seeing it at the state level as we discover these ‘Soros’ District Attorneys refused to prosecute and the same goes for hundreds of judges. It goes far beyond the defunding of the police.
America is in a bad place when it comes to law and order. Laws have no value unless they are applied and applied equally. Criminals and activists are using social media apps and encrypted apps to communicate and coordinate…is that being investigated?
In July of 2019: Mexico’s Congress passed an asset forfeiture bill; there were no additional changes to Mexico’s counterterrorism legislation in 2019. The government lacked adequate laws prohibiting material support to terrorists and relied on counterterrorism regimes in other countries to thwart potential threats. Additional reading here.
CARTEL monsters have hung nine bodies from a bridge in a chilling warning to rival gangs amid a bloody Mexico turf war.
A tenth victim was also found on a nearby road by horrified residents in the Zacatecas municipality of Cuauhtémoc on Thursday at around 6am.
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Nine bodies were found suspended from a bridge in the municipality of Cuauhtémoc on ThursdayCredit: Reuters
Officials believe the gruesome display is related to a dispute between cartels in the area Credit: AP
Officials warned the disturbing display was likely to be linked to a savage dispute between ruthless criminal gangs that operate in the area.
The nine bodies were eventually removed from the overpass by police at around 10am local time, as locals went about their day.
According to local media, the majority of the deceased were identified as residents of the small town Cuauhtémoc, which has a population of just 6,660.
“They pay for the sins of others, it is not fair that they do this to us because they pay for the sinners,” one spooked local told TV Azteca Noticias.
Another added: “It’s scary to go out at night. You have to go to sleep early and every night there is noise, motorcycles, screaming, things like that.”
An “intense investigation” was underway, the local government said, although no arrests have yet been made.
***
“Operation Lone Star,” is Gov. Greg Abbott’s evolving and expensive plan to secure the U.S.-Mexico border using thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guardsmen. The operation, launched in March, was initially billed by Abbott as an effort to “deny Mexican Cartels and other smugglers the ability to move drugs and people into Texas,” but has since become a sprawling and controversial experiment in the use of state power to secure an international border.
Democrats have denounced it as illegal and unconstitutional, and called for a Justice Department investigation. Republicans have praised Abbott for taking a stand and pushing the envelope.
Abbott has not asked the Biden administration for permission because he does not believe he needs it. Indeed, the entire operation has been designed to operate exclusively with state resources and agencies, and within the existing confines of state law. That’s both a strength of Abbott’s approach and, as I saw for myself in Del Rio, Texas, a major weakness.
Abbott’s Border Operation Is A Bureaucratic Morass
It’s a weakness because it severely limits what the operation can achieve. The basic idea is that Texas state troopers and National Guard troops will arrest illegal immigrants, who will in turn be prosecuted for misdemeanor criminal trespass in hopes that such prosecutions will serve as a deterrent. Whatever the merits of this approach to border security, it comes with a host of caveats and constraints.
To begin with, Texas is only arresting single adult men, not women, children, or family units, which means the state is targeting the migrant population most likely to be quickly expelled to Mexico under Title 42, the pandemic public health order that allows federal immigration officials to send migrants back over the border with minimal processing. The migrant men arrested by Texas law enforcement, by contrast, will remain in state custody for weeks or longer, rather than being sent back to Mexico.
Up until last week, migrant men arrested under Operation Lone Star who posted bond would be transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which would typically expel them under Title 42. But last week ICE told the state it would no longer take custody of these migrants. That means Texas will have to transfer them to U.S. Border Patrol, and as of this writing it remains an open question whether Border Patrol will expel them as they would have under Title 42, had federal agents arrested them, or process them as asylum-seekers.
If the latter, then Operation Lone Star might have the unintended effect of rewarding migrants caught by state authorities: once they’re processed and released by Border Patrol to pursue their asylum claims, migrants have legal status, are allowed to work, and can remain in the United States as their case wends its way through federal immigration courts — a process that can take up to five years.
But even before these problems arise there are strict conditions that have to be met before state authorities can even make an arrest. Migrants can only be arrested on private land where landowners have agreed to press charges, and only on those parcels of land where the Texas National Guard has managed to erect temporary barriers, usually some arrangement of concertina wire that migrants must cut or go over, to ensure the trespass charges will stick.
And before Texas National Guardsmen in particular can arrest anyone, they’re supposed to go through 40 hours of police training (in practice, I’m told that it’s more like a day-long training). Also, the migrants who are arrested have to be transported to state prisons that have been retrofitted to comply with state jail standards, since migrants are being held in pretrial confinement. That in turn means all the corrections officers have to be trained as jailers.
On top of all these requirements, the entire operation depends on the willingness of local county attorneys to prosecute a deluge of misdemeanor criminal trespass cases arising from all these arrests. In Kinney County, which has a population of less than 4,000, the county attorney is a young man named Brent Smith who just took office in January and has never before worked as a prosecutor. He now has about 1,300 cases and counting thanks to Operation Lone Star. (For context, in normal times the Kinney County prosecutor would only take on a couple dozen cases per year.)
By contrast, in neighboring Val Verde County, the local prosecutor, David Martinez, a Democrat, has rejected nearly half the cases that have come through his office from Operation Lone Star. Last month, Martinez told a local news station he rejected the cases either because the migrants in question were seeking asylum or because there was some other problem with the case. (He cited one case in which state troopers re-directed a group of migrants to cross onto private property so they could arrest them for trespassing.)
For all this, out of about 1,500 criminal trespass cases filed since July through Operation Lone Star, only about 3 percent have resulted in convictions, according to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, which also cited court records showing that of the 170 Operation Lone Star cases resolved as of November 1, about 70 percent were dismissed, declined, or dropped. The remaining cases ended in plea agreements, with most migrants sentenced to time already served.
Meanwhile, all of this is costing Texas hundreds of millions of dollars. Earlier this year, Abbott shifted about $250 million in the state budget to launch the operation, and the GOP-led state legislature later approved an additional $3 billion. In Del Rio, you can see these dollars at work all over town: every hotel parking lot is full of Texas state trooper trucks and SUVs. Uniformed National Guardsmen drive around in armored Humvees. Along some stretches of private land near the Rio Grande, sparkling new chain-link fencing topped by concertina wire stretches out for miles.
Locals seem to appreciate the effort and money being poured into their communities, especially landowners who feel betrayed and abandoned by the Biden administration. One woman told me her family’s ranch has been repeatedly vandalized this year by migrants — trashed, in fact, for the first time in generations. When they called Border Patrol, the answer came back that no one could be spared to come out and investigate. Their advice was, stay away from your ranch, or move. Their message was, incredibly, we can’t protect you.
Indeed, under the direction of Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Border Patrol has for the past ten months been overwhelmed with the endless task of processing and releasing migrants as fast as it possibly can, with little time or personnel available for patrolling the border. In Del Rio, I spoke to former Border Patrol chief Rodney Scott, who was forced out by the Biden administration in August, and he said agents are demoralized because they’re unable to do their jobs. Instead of intercepting drug and human traffickers or arresting criminals trying to evade detection — the actual job of Border Patrol agents — they’re stuck processing and transporting asylum-seekers.
Scott sees the border as a “national security issue,” but says the Biden administration has a completely different set of priorities. “Unfortunately since January 20, I haven’t seen a single action or even a single conversation while I was still in the chief’s position, to try to slow the flow to actually create a deterrent to illegal entry,” he says. “Every single action has been to basically be more welcoming. How can we process faster? And that’s just going to continue to be an invitation worldwide.”
Is Operation Lone Star Elaborate Political Theater?
Texas, then, really is on its own. Abbott is right that under the circumstances something must be done by the state, but so far his solution seems overly lawyerly and cautious, designed specifically to pass legal muster and win lawsuits rather than create a real deterrent to illegal immigration.
A cynic might suspect that Operation Lone Star, for all its complex interagency coordination and mass deployment of manpower and expensive price tag, is in the end mostly political theater. Its purpose might not be to secure the border so much as to secure Abbott’s right flank against a pair of Republican primary challengers, former GOP Texas Chairman Allen West and former state senator Don Huffines, who accuse Abbott of being too soft on the border.
Given the resources at Abbott’s disposal, West and Huffines — along with plenty of Texas conservatives who are frustrated about the ongoing border crisis — arguably have a point. Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who led U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services under Trump, has argued that border states have a strong constitutional case for securing their own international borders in the face of federal inaction. Cuccinelli and others cite Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which stipulates that no state can engage in diplomacy or war without the consent of Congress, “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay.”
The ongoing border crisis, which has seen a record 1.7 million arrests at the southwest border in the last 12 months, constitutes both an invasion and an imminent danger that will not admit delay, the argument goes, and states have a right to act. Not only could border state governors like Abbott invoke emergency powers to return illegal immigrants directly to Mexico, state legislatures could pass laws making it more difficult for illegal immigrants to remain in those states, mostly through strict licensure and screening requirements for sponsors and refugee resettlement organizations.
All of these things, and much else besides, lie far outside the scope of what Abbott is doing in Texas. There is no question at this point that Operation Lone Star, whatever its merits, will not significantly change the situation along the Rio Grande. The border crisis created by the Biden administration is here to stay — a new normal along the southwest border for as long as the White House desires it.
What could change that? Texas could. Abbott could. He has already demonstrated an impressive ability to mobilize and deploy thousands of Texas law enforcement and military personnel, along with every manner of vehicles, barriers, and transports. Nothing like Operation Lone Star has ever been undertaken, yet it is too little, too late — too pinched and small-minded a response to a rolling crisis that now appears to be permanent.
Abbott could wield these tools to press the constitutional question about what border states can do when the federal government leaves them to their own devices. If he doesn’t, he might find the people of Texas are ready to listen to someone who will. source
