Commentary: Is America turning anti-immigrant?

Immigration is once again front and center after three migrants— a woman and two children — drowned in the Rio Grande on Friday near a park in Eagle Pass, Texas.

This tragedy has only escalated the feud between the Biden administration and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who has tried to take border enforcement into his hands since launching Operation Lone Star in 2021. Last week, the Texas Military Department seized control of Shelby Park, a strip of land next to the river and a popular crossing point, and put up a fence.

“We are not allowing Border Patrol on that property anymore,” Abbott said on Friday, hours before the migrants died.

“We said, ‘We’ve had it. We’re not going to let this happen anymore.’”

On Saturday, Rep. Henry Cuellar, a conservative Democrat who represents a borderland district, posted a statement on X, formerly Twitter, claiming that Texas authorities had physically prevented Border Patrol agents from accessing the area to save them. In response, the Texas Military Department claimed that the migrants had already drowned by the time Border Patrol agents contacted the department.

On Sunday, the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter to Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton demanding that the state vacate the park by Wednesday. The Biden administration has also asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

On Wednesday, Texas defied the order.

“Because the facts and law side with Texas, the State will continue utilizing its constitutional authority to defend her territory, and I will continue defending those lawful efforts in court,” Paxton wrote in his response.

Until the Supreme Court steps in, I do not expect that Abbott’s antics — which include installing razor-covered buoys in the Rio Grande and busing migrants to major U.S. cities in blue states, such as Los Angeles, Chicago and New York — will stop anytime soon. On the contrary, I suspect he’ll only take them further.

“The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” Abbott said earlier this year about how far he’s willing to go.

How could he say such a thing, you ask? Because anti-immigrant sentiment is en vogue these days, even in the liberal bastion of California.

A new UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll co-sponsored by The Times found that 62% of registered voters surveyed felt that the border was not secure. Among Democrats, that figure was 30%. When asked whether unauthorized immigrants created a burden for the country, 21% of Democrats said they were a major burden, 41% said they were a minor burden and 32% said immigrants were not a burden.

This poll, along with the recent CBS/YouGov poll that found nearly half of all respondents agreed with Donald Trump that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of this country, lend credence to the notion that Americans are becoming more and more anti-immigrant.

It’s not just Americans who have shifted right on the issue. President Biden, who promised a compassionate approach to immigration during the campaign trail, has recently signaled that he’s willing to make concessions on border enforcement to get an aid package to Ukraine and Israel passed in Congress, a deal that one former Biden policy advisor called a “political trap for Democrats” in a recent New York Times opinion piece. Despite the compromise, the legislation is being stonewalled by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

“I told the president what I had been saying for many months, and that is that we must have change at the border, substantive policy change,” Johnson said on Wednesday. “We must insist — must insist — that the border be the top priority.”

That Johnson would pull a Lucy with the football on Biden shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Despite the evidence showing that immigrants are a boon to the American economy, using immigrants as a punching bag has been politically expedient for Republicans for the last decade. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 with that rhetoric and by the looks of it, he’ll be doubling down in 2024, which is concerning.

As my colleague Jackie Calmes wrote in her latest column on this anti-immigrant backlash, “We might as well just take down the Statue of Liberty.”

(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)

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