Mexico City, Mexico — Mexico will challenge a Texas law that allows state police to detain migrants and judges to deport them. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says they have begun the process to challenge a law promulgated by the Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott.
He says the Texas state law allows police to detain migrants and gives local judges the authority to order them to leave the country. The process is being carried out through Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“A procedure is already being carried out in Foreign Affairs to challenge this law and, in addition, we are always going to be against these measures. Tell our countrymen and migrants that we are going to be defending them,” he said Tuesday during a press conference.
López Obrador says the federation will intervene because matters related to foreign relations are powers of the federal government of the United States.
“Those are not the powers of the states. He is usurping functions and it has to do with foreign policy and that corresponds to Congress and the President of the United States,” he noted.
This law, which he described as inhumane and political, is carried out in an electoral environment in the United States with the purpose of gaining popularity among voters, however, it violates human rights.
“The governor of Texas acts that way because he wants to be a vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party in the United States and he wants to gain popularity with these measures.
“He is not going to win anything. On the contrary. He is going to lose sympathy because in Texas there are many Mexicans, many migrants,” he said.
“He forgets that Texas is from Mexico, like ten states in the American Union, and he forgets that there are 40 million Mexicans in the United States and he forgets that this great nation was consolidated, strengthened thanks to migrants in the world,” he added during his Tuesday conference.
