(By Bethany Blankley/The Center Square) – A 52nd Texas county, Guadalupe County, has declared an invasion at the southern border.

The county joins 51 others that declared an invasion, have expressed support for border counties, for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and his border security mission, Operation Lone Star.

More counties are declaring an invasion after Kinney, Goliad and Terrell counties were the first to do so in July 2022. Several others are expected to soon follow, The Center Square has learned.

The judge and commissioners of Guadalupe County, part of the San Antonio metropolitan statistical area, signed a resolution Tuesday (Jan. 30) “supporting measures to secure the border and repel the invasion at the border in order to protect our communities.”

The resolution cites the guarantee and self-defense clauses of the U.S. Constitution (Article 4, Section 4, and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3), as do all of the invasion resolutions. The resolution states Texas has a right to self-defense when “the federal government has been derelict in its duties to secure our southern border with Mexico.”

The resolution points to incomplete illegal border crossing data and increased terrorist threats, which have increased every month since January 2021. Last month, the greatest number of illegal border crossers was reported in U.S. history of over 370,000.

That’s after more than 10 million foreign nationals illegally entered the U.S. from January 2021 to November 2023, including 1.7 million who evaded capture, The Center Square exclusively reported.

In fiscal 2023, the greatest number of illegal border crossers were reported to have entered Texas of over 1.9 million. Also in fiscal 2023, the greatest number of known or suspected terrorists, 736, were apprehended nationwide.

Through Texas’ Operation Lone Star, law enforcement officers have seized more than 454 million lethal doses of fentanyl, more than enough to kill everyone in the U.S. and Canada.

The resolution states, “a clear and present danger exists to Guadalupe County and to the State of Texas due to the invasion along our southern border with Mexico caused by the failures of the Biden administration to suppress said invasion and by the willful and wanton lack of enforcement of the laws duly enacted by the Congress of the United States.”

In addition to supporting Abbott and Operation Lone Star, Guadalupe County Judge Kyle Kutscher said, “The federal government has abandoned its responsibility to enforce the laws that are in place and now the state is trying to protect us and … the federal government says they are not allowed to do that,” referring to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

The court ruling only applies to Border Patrol agents destroying Texas concertina wire barriers in Eagle Pass, Texas. It does not impose any restrictions on the state, doesn’t instruct Abbott to take down any barriers or to stop enforcing state law.

“We are absolutely allowed to protect ourselves from danger, from invasion – the Constitution says so. It’s just frustrating that others say we can’t,” the judge said.

County commissioners also expressed their commitment to protecting their residents. Adopting an invasion resolution, they said, “allows the county to have a voice for the people that it serves.”

Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith, who was the first to point to the self-defense clause of the U.S. Constitution and argue for Texas sovereignty, says it authorizes states to defend themselves when “actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.”

Former active-duty JAGs, the former Arizona attorney general, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Jonathan Hullihan, general counsel for Citizens Defending Freedom, argue what’s at stake is constitutional authority and state sovereignty. When citizens’ lives are threatened by transnational criminal organizations such as Mexican cartels and fentanyl being used as a weapon of mass destruction, states have the right to act, a coalition of attorneys general have also argued, led by Florida.

Abbott and the Texas legislature designated Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations last year and increased the penalties for fentanyl poisoning, human smuggling and other border-related crimes.

Hullihan said Crockett County’s resolution is one of the strongest because it identifies the cartels acting as “paramilitary, narco-terrorist organizations that … use migrant warfare to obfuscate the trafficking of drugs and people by utilization of irregular techniques, tactics, and procedures. The terrorist designation acknowledges that non-state actors are conducting irregular warfare operations and breaching the sovereignty and national security of the United States, and furthering Gov. Abbott’s formal diplomatic representation to the United States that the State of Texas is not protected against an in invasion.”

Nearly 100 counties in Texas have issued disaster and invasion declarations, or both, citing the border crisis, The Center Square has exclusively reported. Prior to Kinney, Goliad and Terrell counties, no counties had ever declared an invasion in U.S. history.

The 52 counties that have declared an invasion, according to resolutions obtained by The Center Square, are: Atascosa, Bandera, Burnet, Chambers, Clay, Collin, Crockett, Ector, Edwards, Ellis, Fannin, Franklin, Frio, Goliad, Guadalupe, Hamilton, Hardin, Harrison, Hood, Hunt, Jack, Jasper, Johnson, Karnes, Kinney, La Salle, Lavaca, Leon, Liberty, Live Oak, Madison, McMullen, Medina, Montague, Montgomery, Navarro, Orange, Parker, Presidio, Schleicher, Shackelford, Somervell, Terrell, Throckmorton, Tyler, Uvalde, Van Zandt, Waller, Wharton, Wichita, Wilson and Wise.