September 23, 2024 11:04 AM UTC

Walling Off New Mexico: It's Now Really A Thing

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Albuquerque’s KRQE-TV reports, what was once a running joke with its origin in various flubs committed by Republican politicians attempting to address immigration on the southern U.S. border, sometimes forgetting or misstating the state of New Mexico’s status as a U.S. state, now appears to be a highly questionable reality as the state of Texas installs razor wire along a portion of its border with the Land of Enchantment:

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday responded to the Texas National Guard installing razor wire along the Rio Grande facing New Mexico.

KRQE’s sister station, KTSM, captured video showing troops putting up concertina wire and fencing on the riverbank in the El Paso, Texas, area Tuesday afternoon. The expansion came three days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott posted on X that the state would triple its razor-wire border barriers to “deny illegal entry into our state and our country.”

Gov. Lujan Grisham released the following statement about Texas’ actions:

Gov. Abbott seems to be pushing to make Texas its own country without regard for his neighbors or the fact that Texas is already part of a great nation—the United States. [Pols emphasis] If he doesn’t think that New Mexico is important to the overall well-being of Texas, then he must be forgetting about the Permian Basin and the oil industry that straddles our two states. I don’t see him laying concertina wire there.

Gov. Abbott’s latest political stunt at the border will have no meaningful impact on our nation’s broken immigration system. Only Congress can fix our federal immigration laws, and I implore Republicans in Congress to stop holding up the carefully negotiated, bipartisan agreement they are deliberately stalling in Washington at the expense of our entire nation.

Back in 2019, veteran readers will recall, now ex-President Donald Trump told supporters “We’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico and we’re building a wall in Colorado,” later claiming this was a reference to the supposed benefits to Colorado of his border wall instead of doing what everyone else would do and simply admitting he misspoke–much the same way the non-word “covfefe” became a word. A year before that, GOP gubernatorial loser Walker Stapleton ran a head-scratching ad that seemed to suggest the same thing. In both of these cases, we were able to laugh in the end because of course nobody would ever put up a wall between the borders of two U.S. states. Right?

After sending some 75,000 migrants to Colorado on busses among hundreds of thousands dispersed throughout the country as partisan political vengeance, Texas under Gov. Greg Abbott is building the wall against New Mexico that used to be the punchline of a late-night TV joke. It’s consistent with Abbott’s habit of pushing the boundaries of state power, defying any federal authority that tells him no including the U.S. Supreme Court. And, we’ll be the ones to say it, it’s a telling sign that citizenship is not what Abbott is worried about so much as ethnicity.

As of today, nobody can ever laugh the idea off again. The wall against New Mexico is no longer a bad joke.