Austin — Democrat Bill White blamed Republican Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday for failing to persuade the federal government to provide enough money to secure the Texas-Mexico border and accused him of making an irresponsible statement by saying bombs are going off in El Paso.
"Rick Perry has failed — failed — in nine and a half years to get the federal resources that Texas needs. Eight of those years (Republican) George W. Bush was president," White said after a speech to the Texas Association of Broadcasters. "There comes to be a point when the governor himself needs to be accountable."
White acknowledged that the Mexican drug war is a "real issue" affecting Texas and said drug and human traffickers near the border need to be intercepted. But he said despite the instability and violence in Mexico, a spillover effect hasn't happened in the United States. He said Perry is exaggerating the impact in Texas with some of his comments, such as when he said in a television interview that bombs had exploded in El Paso.
Perry's aides say he was referring to a car bomb that exploded in July in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, across the border from El Paso.
No one uninvolved in the drug or smuggling trade has been known to have been injured or killed in the U.S., and El Paso was named by Congressional Quarterly last year America's second-safest city of its size.
In a separate speech to the broadcasters, Perry said it's only a matter of time until spillover violence comes into Texas.
"The fact of the matter is a line on a map is not going to constrain those individuals," Perry said. "The fact is our citizens' safety is not negotiable."
Perry said the manpower the federal government is sending is not enough — that of 1,250 National Guard troops being sent to the border region, only 20 percent are heading to Texas, even though the state has most of the U.S.-Mexico border territory.
His campaign spokesman, Mark Miner, responding to White's criticism of Perry failing to secure enough federal funding, said Perry has made border security a top priority and made sure the state provided $230 million for border security because the federal government hasn't done enough.
"The governor is being critical of not just this (president's) administration but previous administrations," Miner said. "It's a federal responsibility. They clearly don't understand the need that Texas and other states have."
White agreed that more federal money needs to get into the hands of local law enforcement and that there needs to be more federal agents assigned to the Texas-Mexico border.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama came to Texas for political fundraisers and an education speech, White stayed away from the president, whose popularity is low in Texas. Meanwhile, Perry spoke with Obama when he arrived at the airport in Austin and delivered a letter to Obama's aide warning about the "dire threat" from drug violence along the border. It asked Obama to send more federal resources to the region.
The letter cited examples of violence on the Texas side of the border, including an unexploded grenade that rolled into a bar in Pharr in 2009, a weapon later connected to a similar attacks in Monterrey, Mexico; the assassination of a Juarez cartel hitman living in El Paso, and the recent bullets fired in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, that landed in the walls of El Paso city hall.
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