AUSTIN (KXAN) — President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech featured Texas or Texans throughout as he talked about major topics affecting the nation.
As he highlighted the “chaos that has resulted” from overturning Roe v. Wade, he acknowledged Kate Cox. She was the mom at the center of a challenge to Texas’ abortion ban last year when she tried to receive one under the ban’s medical exceptions. The case went to the Texas Supreme Court, which denied an abortion. In the meantime, as the legal case played out, she left the state to get an abortion.
“Because Texas law banned her ability to act, Kate and her husband had to leave the state to get what she needed,” Biden said. “What her family got through should never have happened as well. But it is happening to so many others.”
Cox was in the audience at the invitation of First Lady Dr. Jill Biden.
Another person Biden named in his speech was also there at his wife’s invitation: Jazmin Cazares, the sister of 9-year-old Jackie, who was killed in the Uvalde mass shooting at her elementary school . Jazmin wore a pin featuring her sister’s photo.
Biden talked about meeting with families in the aftermath.
“We heard their message, and so everyone in this room, in this chamber, should hear the same message,” Biden said. “A constant refrain — and I was there for hours meeting with every family. They said, ‘Do something.'”
Hours before his speech, families in Uvalde shouted frustrations and some walked out of a city council meeting where an independent report recommended Uvalde Police officers be “exonerated.” That city-commissioned report was separate from a Department of Justice report months earlier that found “cascading failures” in law enforcement response that day.
While Biden didn’t specifically name Texas in relation to the border, Gov. Greg Abbott sent a statement reacting to the president’s remarks on that topic.
“Texas families — like Stefanie Turner, who was in attendance at the State of the Union tonight —are grieving as a direct result of the Biden Administration’s inaction to secure our border and keep dangerous drugs and criminals off our streets,” Abbott’s statement said, referencing a guest of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who’s son died of fentanyl poisoning. “Until President Biden steps up and does his job as Commander-in-Chief to secure the border, Texas will hold the line and use every tool and strategy to keep our country safe.”
Abbott highlighted Texas’ Operation Lone Star, a multi-billion dollar initiative to slow border crossings, and the state’s One Pill Kills public awareness campaign related to fentanyl.
Biden’s speech detailed a bipartisan effort “with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen,” that has been “derailed” by politics thus far. He highlighted how it would increase border security employees, asylum officers and immigration judges.
“We can fight about the border, or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it,” Biden said. “Send me the border bill now!”