On Thursday, September 28, Billionaire Elon Musk visited the Texas border with Mexico to get an “unfiltered” view of the situation amidst the surging influx of illegal immigrants via the Eagle Pass. Thousands of migrants have been wading across the Rio Grande near a railway bridge for several days, unfazed by razor wire coils mounted along the river banks by the Texas National Guard.
Musk livestreamed his visit to the US-Mexico border over the social media platform X (formerly, Twitter). During his visit to Eagle Pass, Texas Representative Tony Gonzales accompanied the X owner. It is notable that the city proclaimed a state of emergency last week considering the unprecedented infiltration of thousands of migrants. Congressman Tony Gonzales briefed Musk about the situation on the ground.
Assuming the role of a “citizen journalist,” Elon Musk asked Tony Gonzales if the “all-time high” in the number of illegal immigrants entering Texas through the border, is normal or if the country is seeing a crisis.
Gonzales said that the situation is getting “worse”. Nearly 11,000 immigrants entered the city via the US-Mexico border last week adding that this number is increasing every day.
Musk, who donned a cowboy hat and aviator sunglasses told Gonzales that while he is “extremely pro-immigrant,” he disagrees that people should be allowed to enter the US if they are “breaking the law.”
Gonzales pinned the upsurge in migrants at the southern border on Biden administration policies, calling it a “bad situation all the way around.” Musk reacted in surprise, prompting Gonzales to recount the daily struggles of those living in the heart of the crisis.
The influx of illegal entrants into the country has grown large to an extent, according to Musk, that it is leading to a collapse of social services to the point where even America’s largest city, New York, is buckling under the pressure of just how many illegal immigrants are going there.
“The border crisis is worse every day! New York City is buckling under the load already,” Musk posted on X today.
“If New York can’t handle it, well pretty much no part of the country can. “So if we don’t do something soon we’re just gonna have, like I said, a collapse in social services as we’re already seeing in New York,” Musk asserted.
Notably, approximately 11,000 migrants entered the United States in just 24 hours from Mexico, as reported on September 25. Around 4,000 people crossed the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, including some who crawled through razor wire and waded through the Rio Grande.
According to data analysed by the organisation Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), about 1.23 million migrants have crossed the southern border requesting asylum in the last 11 months. “Thus far more than 1,230,000 new deportation cases have been added to the Court’s docket during FY 2023,” the TRAC report reads.
According to the US media reports, the majority of the migrants entering Texas via the Eagle Pass are from the crisis-hit Venezuela. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, the Venezuelan refugee crisis is the second largest in the world with only Syria ahead of it. There are over 7.7 million Venezuelan refugees in the world. While a significant number of these refugees have settled in South American countries like Columbia and Peru, a large number of them have entered or are set to enter the US via the US-Mexico border.
Recently, Texas Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. said that 6,000 migrants seeking asylum have crossed into Eagle Pass. Mayor Salinas opined that one reason behind the surging influx of migrants in Eagle Pass is that “there is less cartel activity on the Mexican side of the border.”
Amidst the migrant influx crisis, the Biden administration this month decided to expand the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of the more than half a million Venezuelan migrants already in the United States.