Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a full pardon Thursday for a former U.S. Army sergeant convicted of murder for fatally shooting an armed demonstrator in 2020 during nationwide protests against police violence and racial injustice.
Abbott announced the pardon shortly after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles announced a unanimous recommendation that Daniel Perry be pardoned and have his firearms rights restored.
Perry had been in state prison on a 25-year sentence since his 2023 conviction in the killing of Garrett Foster, and was released shortly after the pardon, a prison spokeswoman said.
Perry, who is white, was working as a ride-share driver when his car approached a demonstration in Austin. Prosecutors said he could have driven away from the confrontation with Foster, a white Air Force veteran who witnesses said never raised his gun.
A jury convicted Perry of murder, but Abbott called it a case of self-defense.
“Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney,” Abbott said.
Tag: Greg Abbott
Abbott Rejects Demands of Hamas Supporters
Good.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a defiant statement Sunday, vowing that the demands made by student protesters at the University of Texas at Austin will “NEVER happen.” The students called for the school to divest itself from companies manufacturing weapons for Israel and demanded the resignation of university President Jay Hartzell.
“This will NEVER happen,” Abbott wrote on X about the demands. “The only thing that will happen is that the University and the State will use all law-enforcement tools to quickly terminate illegal protests taking place on campus that clearly violate the laws of the state of Texas and policies of the university.”
Key word in that statement is “illegal.” Protests are fine. People have a right to speak. They do not have a right to infringe on the rights of others.
Also, if these student protestors are so appalled by the fact that the University invests in companies that manufacture weapons for Israel, then why are they helping fund the university through their tuition? They should all immediately withdraw if they are sincere.
Abbott Tells UN to “Pound Sand”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott had a blunt response to learning that LGBTQ+ groups have written to the United Nations to complain about suffering from “systemic” discrimination in the Lone Star state.
Dismissing the international organization with a six-word post on X, formerly Twitter, Abbott wrote: “The UN can go pound sand.”
His comment comes after Texas passed a string of laws that critics consider discriminatory against LGBTQ+ people. Seven new laws in particular have drawn the ire of some gay and transgender organizations and human rights groups, which joined forces to write a letter to officials at the U.N. “to raise alarm about the deteriorating human rights situation for LGBTQIA+ persons in the state of Texas, United States of America, due to hostile rhetoric and legislation from the Texas state government.”
The U.N. has proven to be one of the most bigoted and corrupt organizations in the world. I think Texas does well to ignore them.
Texas Governor Invokes Constitutional Clause to Defend Border
Boom.
Adams Whines About Impact of Leftist Policies
Those illegal aliens show up in Texas unannounced. Nobody is coordinating their arrival with authorities. Why should it be any different if they show up in NYC?
Abbott and Adams spoke with “Nightline” co-anchor Byron Pitts in interviews that aired on Wednesday, where Adams criticized the Republican governor for not coordinating the arrivals of migrants with NYC officials and Abbott doubled down on his policy to bus migrants out of Texas.
“We’ve got to secure our border because the Biden administration is not securing it,” Abbott said. “And then the reason why we began putting people on buses in the first place is because the Biden administration, they were literally dumping migrants off in small little towns of 10 or 25,000 people, and they were completely overwhelmed.”
Meanwhile, Adams criticized Abbott for not coordinating with NYC officials as buses of migrants arrived over the past two weeks.
Texas Increases Exports to D.C.
This has been happening all over America. The only news here is that Abbott’s move forced everyone to see it.
A bus from Texas arrived in Washington, D.C. Wednesday morning, transporting dozens of illegal immigrants as part of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s new plan to counter federal immigration policies during an ongoing border crisis.
Abbott announced last week that he was directing the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM) to transport migrants released from federal custody in Texas to the nation’s capital and other locations outside his state.
The bus pulled up at approximately 8 a.m. local time, blocks away from the U.S. Capitol building. Fox News has learned that they came from the Del Rio sector in Texas, after coming to the U.S. from Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Upon the bus’s arrival in Washington, D.C., individuals disembarked one by one except for family units who exited together. They checked in with officials and had wristbands they were wearing cut off before being told they could go.
Texas Governor Releases School Safety Plan
There’re a lot of good, common sense proposals in here. You can read the whole thing here (44 pages), but here are a few highlights.
Still, the plan won what is perhaps surprising praise from groups and politicians who are often Abbott’s adversaries. State Rep. Chris Turner, the Grand Prairie Democrat who chairs his party’s House caucus, said he and his colleagues “support many of the ideas that Gov. Abbott laid out today.” And Texas Gun Sense Vice President Ed Scruggs said the proposal represents the most movement he’s seen on gun violence issues in Texas in decades.
“We’re happy that the conversation has begun. We basically went 20 years without being able to have this discussion,” Scruggs said. “This type of leadership, even on just a few moderate issues, is important.”
Abbott’s announcement, made at the Dallas school district’s headquarters Wednesday, came one day after students at Santa Fe High School students returned to class for the first time following the deadly shootings.
At the heart of the governor’s proposal is “hardening” schools like Santa Fe as targets, both by guarding them with increased police presence and by persuading more school districts to join existing state programs for arming school staff. Abbott proposed several pages’ worth of revisions to Texas’ School Marshal Program, one of two such systems that combine to arm teachers in more than 170 of Texas’ 1,000-plus school districts.
Schools should not be required to join such programs, Abbott said, but he did propose that the state pay for training for it this summer to ease the burden on individual districts.
[…]
The governor also placed heavy emphasis on “preventing threats in advance,” largely through expanded mental health screening programs and on-campus counseling.
Abbott also proposed expanding a mental health screening program already operated through the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. He said he hopes to “eventually” make that program — currently operational in 10 school districts — a statewide system, and said he recommends Texas fund it with $20 million.
The Telemedicine Wellness, Intervention, Triage, and Referral Project, which aims to identify junior high and high school students at risk of committing school violence and intervene before tragedy occurs, has already had 25 students removed from school, 44 placed in alternative schools and 38 sent to a hospital. Abbott had praised that program just hours after the shooting, tweeting that “we want to use it across the state.”
Texas Governor Recovering From Severe Burns
Late Thursday afternoon, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office found itself dealing with a traumatic and wholly unexpected situation.
The governor, who was on vacation with his family in Jackson Hole, Wyo., was on his way to St. John’s Hospital. He had been accidentally scalded with hot water and had extensive second- and third-degree burns on both legs below the knees and both feet.
Matt Hirsch, the governor’s communications director, began preparing a statement about the injury and how it might require the governor to curtail his schedule for the next couple of weeks, including, perhaps, skipping the Republican National Convention, which will get underway next Monday in Cleveland.
But as he was circulating a draft, the awful events began unfolding in Dallas.
Hirsch scrapped the statement.
“We didn’t want to distract from what was happening in Dallas,” he said. “We still don’t want to.”