Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took aim at Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott over the Department of Justice's recently filed lawsuit that seeks the removal of the floating border barrier the state installed in the Rio Grande last month.
"We celebrate that [President Joe] Biden is presenting this complaint because it is not his [Abbott's] to meddle in international affairs," Lopez Obrador said during his Wednesday morning news conference, according to Breitbart News. "It is the faculty of the federal executive. States are not supposed to have any type of accords with foreign nations. But we have to look at it for what it is; it's a publicity stunt."
Claiming that the Biden administration has abdicated its responsibility to secure the border, Abbott ordered the deployment of the 1,000-foot-long buoy barrier in the stretch of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas, in July to prevent migrants from illegally crossing into the state.
During his conference, Lopez Obrador said that people from Mexico and Texas should be united and that the border barrier divides them instead.
"He [Abbott] is doing everything for votes," Lopez Obrador said. "I think it's going to be counterproductive for him. I don't think people are going to vote for him. They are not going to vote for him."
The Mexican president said that Texas has a large population of people of Hispanic descent, as well as a large population of Latin American migrants who will vote against Abbott.
This is not the first time Lopez Obrador has called for Hispanics to oppose Republican politicians. In May, he urged Florida Hispanics not to vote for Gov. Ron DeSantis to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee because of his hardline stance on illegal immigration.
"I hope the Hispanics of Florida wake up and don't give him a vote, that they don't vote for those who persecute migrants, those who don't respect migrants, because the migrant, as it is said in the Bible, deserves respect," Lopez Obrador said, according to a transcript of his daily press briefing. "You have to respect — says the Bible — the foreigner, not mistreat him."
In addition to filing a lawsuit against Texas over the floating border barrier, the Biden administration last week proposed federal protection for two freshwater mussel species that are found in the Rio Grande — in the same area where Abbott installed the marine buoy barrier.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it is proposing listing the Salina mucket and Mexican fawnsfoot mussels as endangered under the Endangered Species Act and is also proposing to designate critical habitat for them.
An endangerment declaration for the mussels could force Abbott to reel in the floating barrier and could prevent Texas from deploying more buoys in the border river, which would be considered a "critical habitat."
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