Faulting the federal government for lax border enforcement, leaders in the Texas Senate signaled they would continue to spend significant portions of the state budget on efforts to curb immigration.
The state allocated more than $4 billion on the issue in the last two years, including $40 million in ongoing efforts to bus migrants from Texas border towns to Democrat-led cities across the country and $163 million on a state-funded border wall. Lawmakers appear eager to re-up that kind of funding.
“In our base budget, the House and the Senate [have] projected that we would continue the investment in the wall,” said Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who leads the budget-writing Senate Finance Committee, during a hearing Friday. “The federal government does not appear to be taking this extremely serious problem seriously at all, and so the state has felt an obligation to continue with this financial commitment.”
