Recent news coverage of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham criticizing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security efforts doesn’t mention that just months before, New Mexico legislators traveled to Texas to learn how to secure New Mexico’s border.
As The Center Square first reported in February after Texas’ border security operations expanded, illegal border crossings shifted west, into New Mexico, Arizona and California. Lujan Grisham is Texas’ only neighbor not to participate in Texas’ border security mission, Operation Lone Star, unlike Oklahoma and Louisiana.
As Lujan Grisham criticized Texas, illegal border crossings surged in New Mexico, spilling into Texas, including apprehensions by Texas OLS officers. In the U.S. Customs and Border Protection El Paso Sector, which includes two west Texas counties and all of New Mexico, Border Patrol agents in southeast New Mexico were inundated. New Mexico apprehensions outnumbered those in Texas in nearly all months this year, according to Border Patrol data exclusively obtained by The Center Square.
This month so far, for example, of the 9,035 illegal border crossers reported in the El Paso Sector, the majority, 7,893, were apprehended in New Mexico, according to the data.
