EAGLE PASS, TEXAS — Every day, they wade down the Rio Grande, probing the shores for a break in the razor wire now strung along the shore. Illegal migrants by the thousands, looking for the chance to dash across the border.
This is where Gov. Greg Abbott has taken his most muscular stand yet to break a historic mass migration event. Texas has greatly extended Operation Hold the Line, which since May has state police and National Guard block immigrants at the river’s edge.
Many eventually swim back to the Mexican town of Piedras Negras — but they haven’t given up.
After all, in the bizarre logic under President Biden, while Texas may keep them out, if they find a federal Border Patrol agent, they’ll be let right in.
It’s become a war: Texas actually enforcing the law, and the Biden administration fighting it at every step.
“Here they won’t permit us to cross,” one dripping wet Venezuelan mother told me. “But on the other side there are some buses where you can turn yourself in and cross, so we’re going there.”
The Del Rio Sector, which encompasses Eagle Pass, is now the most heavily trammeled sector in Texas. Some 30,000 people a month cross here.
Fed up with the feds, Abbott was given $5.1 billion for border security by his Republican state legislature and a quiver of six new border laws.
Texas got to work, and thousands of yards of riverfront now stand denuded of riparian vegetation that once provided cover for illegal entries.
Beneath Eagle Pass’ international bridges is a tightly fitted cargo container wall, then endless coils of concertina wire and chain link fencing stretching beyond line of sight, continually being extended both upstream and downstream.
The governor’s denial-of-entry enforcement experiment has reshaped the river itself.
Abbott’s forces have occupied and denied the use of gravel bar islands that immigrants often used to cross.
The state went so far as to even eliminate one problematic 44-acre island by having a strand of river filled in with dirt, cleared of vegetation, and ringed with barbed wire for Hold the Line action.
It is now part of mainland Texas.
One smaller gravel island, state police thinned out the vegetation and planted a tall Texas flag as part of another initiative extended to the area: to jail adult immigrant men and women on misdemeanor trespassing charges.
Hundreds have been charged and jailed.
Now the governor also is installing the first thousand feet of a mid-river marine barrier designed to keep immigrants from even reaching the Texas riverbank.
But there’s a flaw in the plan: River crossers have learned that, while Abbott’s tan uniformed men foil their American dreams, Biden’s green uniformed men deliver them on a silver platter.
“They [Texas Department of Public Safety officers] won’t let us pass,” one young Venezuelan man explained after swimming back and now trudging upstream to a spot where they heard “American inmigración” can be found.
“Over there, Border Patrol will take you so we can try and get asylum because we’re poor and we’re wanting a better life.” he said, squishing away in wet sneakers.
Because Biden’s Border Patrol is working at cross-purposes with Abbott’s state forces, just the sight of Border Patrol agents among the Texans stimulates immigrants to break through to reach them for the quick-release benefit.
Border Patrol usually hands them Notice to Appear papers with a future date at which they are to voluntarily report to an ICE office in their city of choice, then are freed on their own recognizance.
State officials believe the Border Patrol, normally a close-quarters partner, is under orders from Washington to undermine the Texas measures by merely waving the agency’s iconic green and white colors at locations where Texas isn’t present.
On at least one occasion, a Border Patrol cut a Texas wire line to let some immigrants in.
“They’ll keep walking and walking until there’s an opening and eventually they’ll find something and get across with Border Patrol,” Texas DPS Lt. Christopher Olivares told me. “It’s not their fault; they’re acting under orders. It just makes it more challenging to us, where we’re trying to stop it and they’re [Border Patrol] not helping.”
Sometimes parents will shove a baby or their children under the wire so that state police will have no choice but then let the family in to reunite with them under Border Patrol custody.
Other times, immigrants in family groups exploit another weakness: if they get in behind the wire, the Texans have no authority to do anything other than turn them over to Border Patrol for a quick release because the state won’t jail families for trespassing.
Another surefire way to defeat the Texans is to hike to the farthest reaches of the Texas line, then cross and unite with Border Patrol.
In one instance at the farthest eastern end of the Texas occupation, I was driving on a highway and to my right saw more than 100 Venezuelans, Cubans and Colombians surrounded by Texas police and a few Border Patrol agents.
They’d clearly gone around the Texas defenses.
Soon, several Border Patrol transport vans pulled up.
That usually signals the start of releases into the American interior within 24 hours, especially or family groups who are almost always released since Biden took office.
All of these successes, large and small, seem to be wearing down the power of what Texas is doing as a deterrent.
A journalist friend of mine in Piedras Negras told me 400 immigrants a day were showing up on freight trains outside town to try the Texas line, clearly undeterred.
All of this makes for than strange bedfellows and situations.
For instance, one of the most emblematic manifestations of the Abbott-Biden border war recently unfolded on a large private pecan ranch in the heart of Abbott’s fortifications, where the state had already built a chain-link fence and strung razor wire.
That is where owners Hugo and Magaly Urbina agreed to lease Border Patrol a chunk of riverfront land and place a large tented field facility where illegally crossing immigrants could conveniently be processed in and put on buses to a brick-and-mortar processing center nearby.
Magaly Urbina said she agreed to a Border Patrol request to lease the land because immigrants typically get into trouble with the summer heat: “The human part of us kicked in and said it’s right to help another human being.”
The Urbinas dug a walkway ramp dug down to the river, and immigrants naturally beelined through the gap into the welcoming arms of Border Patrol, much to the chagrin of Texas officials.
The Texas response was swift and aggressive. Abbott sent his state troopers to occupy the Urbina’s riverfront land on grounds that criminal activity was taking place there.
They bulldozed the walk ramp away, strung razor wire across it, planted a large city sign that remains and reads: “You cannot pass here.”
