Justice & Law Quote by Rick Perry

Perry’s line is doing two jobs at once: laundering a hardline policy stance through the language of duty, and relocating responsibility from lawmakers to the bodies on the line. By saying he “supported Arizona’s immigration law” and “joined in that lawsuit to defend it,” he frames himself as a participant in a righteous legal crusade, not a politician staking out a polarizing position. The legalistic phrasing matters. “Defend it” suggests the law is under attack, turning civil-rights criticism into an assault on order itself.

Then comes the pivot to lived, daily urgency: “Every day I have Texans on that border that are doing their job.” It’s a sentence engineered to feel like a dispatch from the front. “I have Texans” is possessive and managerial, casting border personnel as his people, his proof. “Every day” acts as a drumbeat, implying constant threat without naming specifics. And “doing their job” is a moral shield: if enforcement is just work, then opposing the law becomes opposing workers, not policy.

The context is the early 2010s backlash-and-anxiety cycle around immigration, when Arizona’s SB 1070 became a national proxy war and Republican governors competed to project toughness. Perry’s subtext is clear: solidarity with Arizona is solidarity with a vision of sovereignty where suspicion is operationalized. The quote works because it turns a contested statute into a simple story of defense, diligence, and borders-as-sacred-duty, leaving little room for the messier human or constitutional costs.