MILWAUKEE — Texas Governor Greg Abbott used his time addressing the Republican National Convention on Wednesday to praise his own defiance of Joe Biden’s border policies. The theme Wednesday was “Make America Strong Again,” with speakers criticizing Biden’s policies and praising Trump’s resilience in the wake of Saturday’s attempted assassination.
With multiple speakers bringing up security at the southern border, Abbott was one of many prominent Republicans criticizing Biden and Harris’ handling of the border crisis.
The topic is relevant in Wisconsin, where Whitewater Police Chief Dan Meyer and City Manager John Weidl signed a letter last December estimating that 800 to 1,000 new residents arrived in the city between early 2022 and the end of 2023.
The letter, which was delivered to the Whitewater Common Council with the goal of delivering it to prominent Wisconsin political, pleaded for funding to hire additional police officers and an immigrant liaison, among other staff to aid the crisis.
In the letter, Meyer and his co-signers cited a “rapid increase” of Venezuelan and Nicaraguan immigrants to the city.
“It is time to restore order at the border, and rid our streets of crime and chaos,” Abbott said
In an interview Wednesday with The Gazette on the convention grounds, Fifth Congressional District alternate delegate and UW-Whitewater alum John Beauchamp said the influx of people moving to the city is an issue that hits close to home.
“I’m not going to claim to know where the additional migrants down there came from or how they got there or whatnot — but I know that they’re putting a strain on the policing resources.”
Resources, Beauchamp feels, “that could go toward protecting the students there, protecting the community that lives there.”
According to the letter, the Whitewater Police Department spent $6,000 on translation services in 2023 and has struggled with officers spread too thin to police proactively.
More than condemning the immigrants who have taken up residence in Whitewater, the letter’s concerns also lie with the safety of both migrants and citizens. For instance, citations issued for driving without a license tripled between 2020 and 2022, it said.
“The system is definitely plagued with a lot of issues, but at the same time, we need to fix a lot of the issues we’re seeing occurring on the southern border with human trafficking [and] drug trafficking,” Beauchamp said.
Abbott’s remarks at the RNC highlighted the potential for violence that an “open border” provides — referencing drug death, human trafficking and the murder of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray late last month, for which two Venezuelan men were charged for capital murder for her death.
“It is time to restore order at the border, and rid our streets of crime and chaos,” Abbott said.
While reporting on Nugaray’s murder, the Associated Press cited one study by the National Academy of Sciences based on data from 2012-2018 from the Texas Department of Public Sciences, that American-born residents were over twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes than those who resided in the country illegally.
“There’s a lot of stuff going on down there that I think really does need to be cleaned up. That presents a pretty big threat to our national security,” Beauchamp said.
“We definitely need to clean up the system so that we can get more immigrants coming here legally.”
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