There will be "total chaos" at the U.S.-Mexico border this week if the courts don't intervene and halt the Biden administration's removal of Title 42 rules put in place by former President Donald Trump's administration during the COVID-19 pandemic to limit the numbers of people crossing into the country, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott warned in an interview airing Sunday.
"That's about COVID," the Republican governor told ABC News' "This Week" host Martha Raddatz in an interview recorded from near the border. "That's about public health risk and whether it's COVID or some other issue, when you have someone coming across from the globe and you don't know their health status, that by definition is a public health risk and there's every reason to keep that in place."
Raddatz argued that statistics show that "maybe one person a day" with COVID is coming across, but Abbott told her that immigrants coming into the United States aren't being tested for the disease.
"Who knows how many people have COVID?" he said. "Who knows what other type of disease they may have? The answer is, nobody knows because nobody is testing them."
Abbott insisted that he does not oppose legal immigration, but said that with hundreds of thousands of migrants pushing across the border, it makes it more difficult for people to enter the country legally.
"There are people across the globe who have a valid, a solid reason to come to the United States," he said. "They can do so legally right now."
However, such immigrants "get pushed further and further and further back the line every single day," said Abbott, later adding that "we have every level of government doing everything to prevent people coming into the country illegally."
The governor's Operation Lone Star initiative at the border has cost more than $4 billion, with more taxpayer dollars being spent to bus migrants away from the state and to sanctuary cities such as New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia, and he told Raddatz that's because those communities can handle the influx while Texas' cities are suffering from the overflow.
"They're having thousands of people dumped off into their communities, thousands of migrants," said Abbott. "They don't have the capability of dealing with that vast number of migrants. I removed them to locations that self-identified as sanctuary cities, that have the capability and the desire to help out these migrants and so that's exactly what's taken place."
Abbott further commented that it was "known from the time" that President Joe Biden took office that he "supported open borders."
"It's known by the cartels who have sophisticated information," said Abbott. "Whether or not the Biden administration is going to enforce the immigration laws or not is known across the world, but more importantly known in the cartels."