With Texas on the front lines of the screwworm crisis, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown and the increasingly volatile oil market, it’s no surprise the White House is dispatching top cabinet officials to the Lone Star State this week to address all three topics.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is scheduled to meet with bankers in Houston on Friday to, among other things, urge financial institutions to be vigilant against “unlawful employment” of undocumented workers.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright made a stop at Rice University on Thursday and plans to meet with officials at Port Houston on Friday to talk about the energy market and oil exports at a time the war in Iran is creating major uncertainty.
Rollins assured ranchers that the USDA has over 100 staff members focused on fighting the spread of the parasite that threatens the state’s livestock industry. She promised the agency will be “extremely aggressive and vigilant” in containing the fly and ultimately eradicating it from the U.S.
“We’re going to beat this,” Rollins, a Texas native, said during her stop in South Texas.
Bessent’s visit to talk about immigration in Texas comes as business leaders have complained about the struggle to find workers amid the administration’s immigration crackdown. In April, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas cited the deportation roundup as one of the reasons for the thinning job pool.
“Given the decline in immigration inflows, increase in arrests and removals of immigrants already here and the chilling effect, labor supply is clearly being affected,” they wrote.
Bessent comes at a time when the administration is calling on the banking world to help cut off the economic lifeline to migrants living in the country illegally and keep non-citizens from having access to financial networks designed for Americans.
“This Administration will not allow illegal aliens to abuse financial institutions to steal billions of dollars from hardworking American taxpayers,” Bessent said last week in a press release previewing part of his message to Texas bankers.
Wright’s stops come at a time gas prices have skyrocketed, benefiting the Texas energy sector as it is being relied on to support a world market greatly impacted by the war in Iran. But volatility has the industry struggling to plan.
The Trump administration’s focus on Texas comes at a critical time, as political experts warn that worries over the economy, the war and now a major threat to Texas beef, are giving Democrats their best chance to flip the state blue since Ann Richards was governor and Lloyd Bentsen was one of the state’s U.S. Senators in the 1990s.