Texas authorities added even more buoys into the Rio Grande on Wednesday to stop illegal crossing after the Biden administration unsuccessfully sued the state over its floating border barriers.
“Despite the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to shut down our border security efforts, the buoys are here to stay,” Republican Gov. Greg Abbott posted on X, along with a video showing a section of interconnected, washing machine-sized orbs, that spin when grabbed, being lowered into the water.
“We won’t back down from our mission to deter & repel illegal immigration,” he added.
Officials in border states are bracing for a possible surge of migrants to the border as illegal crossers rush to try to get into the US before President-elect Trump takes office.
While there have been groups of dozens migrants caught, so far the uptick has not materialized, source said earlier this week.
The new barricades added to a 1,000-foot string of existing barricades Texas placed in the Rio Grande in June, 2023, near Eagle Pass — a notorious hotspot for drug trafficking and human smuggling.
“These have been so successful that not a single migrant has attempted to cross over them,” said Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris.
The floating wall kicked off a legal battle between the Lone Star State and the Biden Administration, which sued to have the barriers removed, claiming they violated the federal Rivers and Harbor Act.
A district court initially sided with the feds, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled the barriers could stay.
The Supreme Court will likely decide the fate of the buoys, but in the meantime Abbott is happy to keep dropping them in the drink.
“Despite the Biden Administration fighting us every step of the way, courts have ruled that Texas has the right to deploy floating marine barriers, and Texas is installing even more of these barriers to stop illegal immigration into our state,” Mahaleris said.
Although the 1,000-foot barrier does little to fully plug the roughly 1,200-mile border, it may have helped thrwart illegal crossings in and around Eagle Pass, which plummeted to 8,500 last month from 38,000 in the same month last year.
Unauthorized crossings have dropped across the border, after the Biden Administration, seeking to ease border anxiety ahead of the presidential election, imposed new restrictions on asylum seekers’ ability to remain in the country after entering illegally.