Abbott Sounds The Alarm About The End Of Title 42: ‘Total Chaos…Catastrophic’

Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott said ending Title 42 would bring “total chaos” to America’s southern border.

Interviewed on ABC News’s “This Week,” Abbott warned that the termination of the Trump-era border and health policy would burden border communities already dealing with a flood of unlawful migrant crossings. Title 42, which allows border agents to turn away migrants on an expedited basis because of a public health emergency, expires Wednesday.

“If the courts do not intervene and put a halt to the removal of Title 42, it’s gonna be total chaos,” Abbott said bluntly in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “It’s gonna be catastrophic, not just for Texas, but for the United States of America.”

Abbott stressed that even though the COVID pandemic is over, the influx of thousands of migrants every day still presents a danger to public health.

“Whether it’s COVID or some other issue, when you have people coming across the globe without knowing at all what their health status is, that almost by definition is a public health risk,” he said. “There’s every reason to keep that in place.”

Abbott called on President Joe Biden to enforce the existing laws. Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked the administration from ending Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, which sent some non-Mexican migrants to Mexico while awaiting immigration hearings rather than being detained or released in the U.S.

“If the President steps up and does his job, required by the Constitution and required by the federal courts, and enforces Remain in Mexico, that would have the same level of effectiveness as keeping Title 42 in place,” said Abbott. In the meantime, “we have every level of government doing everything we can to prevent people from coming into the country illegally or repelling them or arresting them and putting them behind bars,” he said.

Texas is one of several Republican-led states currently trying to keep the Title 42 border policy in place. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal of the original court decision on Friday, but Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich confirmed to ABC that he intends to appeal that ruling to the Supreme Court in an effort to extend Title 42.

If and when Title 42 expires, experts predict that as many as 14,000 illegal aliens will cross the border every day. As The Daily Wire’s Tim Meads pointed out, that would mean approximately 126,000 more migrants would unlawfully cross the border by December 30.