Texas Governor Greg Abbott spoke with ABC’s “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz for an interview that aired Sunday morning. Raddatz traveled to the southern border to see the Biden border crisis with the governor. That’s more than the president or the vice-president (the border czar) have done. Abbott said that if Title 42 ends on Wednesday, as it is scheduled to do, he anticipates catastrophe along the southern border. “If the courts do not intervene and put a halt to the removal of Title 42, it’s gonna be total chaos.”

There are interesting points that media people like Raddatz are making in the discussion about the lifting of Title 42. By interesting, I mean gaslighting. Raddatz described Title 42 as a Trump policy and she said that the only people she hears calling the border open and accepting of illegal immigrants are people like Governors Abbott and DeSantis. Both points are a little too cute by half.

As far as Title 42 being a Trump policy goes, that’s false. It is a public health policy that the CDC recommended that the former president put into effect to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020. Yes, Trump was the president at that time but it wasn’t a policy created by his administration, which is the implication when a television host labels the policy as a Trump policy.

From a transcript released by ABC News on Sunday: (emphasis mine)

RADDATZ: We joined Governor Greg Abbott of Texas as he surveyed the border this week. One of the Republican governors fighting to keep Title 42 in place, that Trump policy implemented at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic which allows the U.S. Government to immediately expel most migrants as a public health risk. Since March of 2020, it’s been used nearly 2.5 million times.

Words matter and while this may seem like nitpicking, it is how the debate is framed to convince the public that it must be something that should be halted because the bad Orange Man put it into effect. The fact is that while Biden and his administration give lip service to ending Title 42, they have only recently set about seriously doing that. They never fully enforced the policy but they didn’t end it, either.

Raddatz asked why GOP-governed states are legally challenging the end of Title 42, since the pandemic is supposed to be over. Abbott said that may be true but Title 42 is useful during times like this when there are millions of illegal immigrants trying to cross the border without proper screening or vetting. The ACLU notes that Title 42 hinders asylum-seekers at the border.

Raddatz pressed Abbott on how to justify keeping Title 42 in place when it is a public health order, not official immigration policy.

“Whether it’s COVID or some other issue, when you have people coming in from across the globe, without knowing at all what their health status is, that almost by definition is a public health risk,” Abbott responded. “There’s every reason to keep that in place.”

But immigration advocates and those fighting to repeal Title 42 have questioned the GOP states’ motive for wanting to keep the policy in place.

“They have been fighting to end COVID restrictions everywhere since the beginning. And now all of a sudden, they want a public health restriction solely when it comes to asylum-seekers. I think the real game here is that they’re trying to close the border,” said Lee Gelernt, the lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s challenge to Title 42, in a statement.

A particularly galling assertion by the likes of Raddatz is that the people really encouraging illegal immigrants to cross the border are people who are criticizing the administration’s lack of action to close the border, including Governors Abbott and Ron DeSantis. That takes cojones. Abbott reminded her that Biden campaigned on doing away with all of the policies and agreements in place that the previous administration used to secure the border. He did just that on his very first day in office.

The Biden administration insists they’ve been preparing for the end of Title 42, pointing to the hiring of more Border Patrol staff and contractors. Biden officials are also pushing back on claims from Abbott and other Republican officials that the end of Title 42 equates to an open border.

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard President Biden say, ‘We have an open border, come on over,'” Raddatz said. “The people I have heard say it are you, are former President Trump, are Ron DeSantis. That message reverberates in Mexico and beyond. So they do get the message that it is an open border and smugglers use all those kinds of statements.”

Abbott argued that malicious actors have seized on Biden’s border policies since he became president.

“It was known from the time that Joe Biden got elected that Joe Biden supported open borders,” Abbott said. “It is known by the cartels, they have sophisticated information. Whether or not the Biden administration is going to enforce the immigration laws or not is known across the world but most importantly, known among the cartels.”

It’s amazing how it is Republicans who are to blame for the Biden border crisis, though Democrats have been in charge of everything for the past two years. The legacy networks are happy to cover for Biden and point fingers in the direction of Republicans. Of course Greg Abbott is speaking out about the border, Texas is a border state that shares 1200 miles of border with Mexico. He and other border state governors have been left to deal with the crisis and chaos on the border since it began. As I said, Joe Biden hasn’t even bothered to make the trip and see for himself what is going on. He doesn’t care. The Biden border crisis is intentional and it is a dereliction of duty. The media doesn’t care, either, and they continue to cover for his administration.