- Voters say border security is more important than a Supreme Court ruling
- Older people, men, and Republicans are bigger fans of the barbed deterrent
- READ MORE: A record-breaking 57% of voters say US-Mexico border is in 'crisis'
Voters by a wide margin support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's crackdown on migrants, saying they back his razor wire barriers despite opposition from the Biden administration and the Supreme Court, our poll shows.
Fully 56 percent of respondents said they supported Abbott's barbed metal deterrent on the Texas-Mexico border, which defies court rulings and usurps authority from the federal government.
About a third of respondents said they disagreed with the Republican governor’s anti-migrant moves, while another 12 percent said they were not sure, the DailyMail.com/TIPP Poll of 1,400 US adults found.
The survey reflects growing alarm about record-breaking people-flows across the southern border, which are hurting President Joe Biden's chances of winning a second term in November's election.
Social media users have praised the razor wire barrier, saying it 'evidently works,' while others bash it as inhumane. Migrants have posted video explainers of how to slip under fences using boards as protection.
Gov Abbott has vowed to expand the razor wire and military presence along the state's crisis-stricken southern border, which goes against an emergency SCOTUS ruling which authorized border police to remove miles of the wire.
The 66-year-old governor, a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump, has been entangled in an ongoing feud with the Biden administration over the handling of the border.
Abbott gathered 14 fellow Republican state governors at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass over the weekend to focus attention on the frontier.
He celebrated his state's razor wire installation for leading to a 'massive reduction' in crossings at an area that previously saw up to 4,000 migrants enter the US each day.
'For the past three days, we have averaged just three people crossing that area,' Abbott said.
The other governors showed 'we are banding together to fight to ensure that we will be able to maintain our constitutional guarantee, that states will be able to defend against any type of imminent danger or invasion,' he added.
Our survey showed broad support for Abbott across all parts of the country.
While two-thirds of older Americans, aged 65 and above, supported the razor wire deterrent, a much smaller share of voters aged 18-24 supported the move, with only 40 percent saying they backed Abbott.
Likewise, men and Republicans were much stronger supporters of the hard-line measure than were women and Democrats, according to our survey, which was carried out at the beginning of February.
A Morning Consult poll released earlier this week found that 57 percent of respondents say the US is battling a 'crisis of illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border,' a sharp rise on the 50 percent who said so in March 2021.
The nationwide survey of 2,000 voters has troubling findings for President Biden, a Democrat, who looks set to face his anti-immigration predecessor Trump in this year's election.
Nearly half of voters — 49 percent — said Biden was 'very responsible' for the influx of migrants at the southern frontier, followed by two in five voters who blamed the president's Democratic Party.
Americans have in recent days taken to social media to voice concerns about the people flows, which led to 10,000 arrests for illegal crossings at the border each day for several days in December.
Avery Jones, a Texas-based Army veteran and TikTok creator, visited the frontier to see the situation with her own eyes, saying the chaotic scenes there were 'definitely a crisis.'
'Illegals are coming in by the thousands, mostly men,' she said, adding that Republicans and Democratic politicians in Washington DC were stoking divisions between voters 'because it's an election year.'
Others, including California-based TikTok creator C Jamees railed against the ease with which asylum seekers can enter the US, get handouts from charities and enjoy tax-funded services.
'What countries can I go to illegally and get free rent and free healthcare and a $1,000 cash card and a new iPhone?' Jamees asked her 31,000 followers.
'If somebody could tell me that, so I could take my happy a** to another country, cos I'm tired of paying rent.'
