Texas governor buys billboards warning migrants they'll be raped if they illegally cross border

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Somehow I missed this story from 3 days ago.

"How much did you pay to have your daughter raped?" That's the English translation of one of the grotesque Spanish messages featured in a billboard ad campaign Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is spending $100,000 on in a bid to deter migrants from crossing the border. Abbott unveiled the campaign Thursday in Eagle Pass, pledging to splash similar messages across dozens of signs in Mexico and Central America. Other slogans would read "Many girls who try to migrate to Texas are kidnapped" and "Your wife and daughter will pay for their trip with their bodies."

"They give potential illegal immigrants thinking of leaving their home country — and those already on the way — a realistic picture of what will happen to them on their journey or if they illegally cross into Texas," Abbott said. Abbott didn't specify where the money for the new campaign would come from his press conference. The governor held the campaign's unveiling next to the burnt remnants of an alleged "rape tree." Abbott said smugglers sexually assaulted migrants at the tree then torched it as sick memorial.

"We want no more rape trees in Texas," a finger-wagging Abbott declared. A 2022 investigation by news outlet Border Report based on interviews with South Texas sheriffs and federal officials found no evidence that "rape trees" are real. Even so, sexual assault against migrants is a serious problem. A 2019 New York Times report found more than 100 documented reports of sexual assaults of migrant women along the border over the past two decades. Many others likely go unreported, according to the Times.

Abbott has made a crackdown on illegal border crossings part of his political brand, spending $11 billion in taxpayer funds on his Operation Lone Star border-security effort. He's also leveled false claims that the Biden White House promoted illegal migration with "open door border policies." Abbott's latest political grandstanding at the border comes weeks after the governor said the state would donate a 1,402-acre ranch in Starr County to help with the incoming Trump administration's mass-deportation efforts.

https://www.sacurrent.com/news/texas-governor-buys-billboards-warning-migrants-theyll-be-raped-if-they-illegally-cross-border-36334902