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The Plains Memorial Hospital Auxiliary held its annual holiday bake sale, with treats and baked goods for every sweet tooth. Member of the auxiliary raise money to benefit the hospital with equipment and other needed items.
After several busloads of illegal migrants from the southwest border of Texas were dropped near Vice President Kamala Harris’ DC home, the White House accused Texas Governor Greg Abbott of endangering lives, after ignoring a plea from Abbott for assistance.
Abbott, a vocal critic of Biden administration immigration policies, has not acknowledged the bus drop and his office has not claimed responsibility. According to reports, an estimated 110 to 130 illegal immigrants Texas has bused about 8500 illegal migrants to Washington, New York City and Chicago, sanctuary cities, where law enforcement is discouraged from deporting immigrants, following the high levels of along the U.S. southern border.
In a letter to Biden on Dec. 20, Abbott said the state was overburdened with thousands of men, women and children crossing into Texas everyday who risk freezing to death on city streets.
Hidalgo County, Texas, Judge Richard Cortez told CNN that localities in Texas like his were overwhelmed by the number of immigrants and could not accommodate them all.
“Busing immigrants out of this area in a way helps us,” said Cortez, whose county borders Mexico.
According to Attorney General Ken Paxton, there are hundreds of millions of dollars that Texas taxpayers have involuntarily spent on illegal aliens every year, including up to $717 million each year for public hospital districts to provide uncompensated care for illegal aliens; $152 million to house illegal criminal aliens for just one year; up to $90 million to include illegal aliens in the state Emergency Medicaid program; more than $1 million for The Family Violence Program to provide services to illegal aliens for one year. up to $38 million per year on perinatal coverage through the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and up to $63 million to educate unaccompanied alien children each year.
The new Omnibus spending bill will do little to help Texas with the border problem. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise called out the Senate’s bipartisan omnibus spending bill that has earmarks and funding for other nations’ border security – not the United States’.
Despite the bloated size of this bill and ridiculously short timeframe in which the Senate had to consider it, the omnibus effectively did nothing to combat the growing crisis at the Southern Border. In fact, portions of it forbid federal agencies from doing so. Of the additional $400 million given to the Border Patrol, the text requires that none of the funds be used “to acquire, maintain, or extend border security technology and capabilities, except for technology and capabilities to improve Border Patrol processing.”
This means that the entirety of the new Border Patrol funding must be used to help process illegal aliens and, in most cases, usher them into the United States.
To that end, the bill also creates a new $800 million dollar grant program to local governments and nonprofits that offer shelter and services to illegal aliens released into the country by the federal government. There was little to actually secure border and the enforcement of immigration laws.
Additionally, the omnibus only allocates 0.14 percent in additional funding to the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With annual inflation still hovering at around 8 percent, this amounts to a significant decrease in ICE funding at a time when thousands of new illegal aliens are entering the country’s interior every day. Similarly, Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Office of Field Operations (OFO) saw a budget increase that fell short of the current inflation rate.
Meanwhile, Democrats inserted a section in the bill requiring that $410 million to “remain available” to reimburse Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia and Oman for “enhanced border security” in the Middle East. At least $150 million of that must go to Jordan, according to the legislation.