Since 2021, the city of Eagle Pass, along the banks of Rio Grande and just a few hours from San Antonio, has been a prime crossing point for people seeking to turn themselves in to U.S. authorities and ask for asylum, as is their legal right. Between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico, though, the Rio Grande is especially dangerous.
Between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico, the Rio Grande is especially dangerous.
On Sept. 1 last year, 13 migrants drowned there. Earlier in 2022, authorities had recovered 12 bodies from the river in a single day. On the first day of this month, authorities recovered the bodies of a Guatemalan woman and her infant daughter.
A normal country, and state, would act to prevent such deaths by making the crossing safer, or even making crossing a dangerous river unnecessary. But Texas, which has strung miles of razor-sharp coils of concertina wire along the riverbank and shallows, and is building a 1,000-foot floating “wall” of buoys in the middle of the river in front of downtown Eagle Pass, is deliberately making the Rio Grande more dangerous to cross.
And according to a Texas state trooper whose email to a superior was published by the Houston Chronicle, authorities along the border have been ordered to put individual migrants in more danger. According to that trooper, those orders have included pushing desperate migrants back into the river.
State Trooper Nicholas Wingate is a medic assigned to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s state-funded border security crackdown in Eagle Pass, and according to his email, the results of Texas' efforts to make crossing the river more dangerous have been horrifying:
● On June 25, troopers found 120 people, exhausted during an intense heat wave, waiting to turn themselves in on the riverbank. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) commanding shift officer twice gave orders “to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico” despite the drowning risk.
● On June 30, Texas National Guardsmen, acting on orders, “pressed back” a 4-year-old girl on the riverbank alongside coils of wire. The girl passed out in the heat.
● That day, troopers found a man with “a significant laceration in his left leg” from the concertina wire. He told troopers that his child was “stuck on a trap in the water”: a barrel wrapped in sharp wire.
● Also that day, a 15-year-old boy broke his leg when, in an effort to avoid the wire, he re-entered the river in an area of dangerous currents.
● That evening, troopers came across a 19-year-old woman “who was in obvious pain,” stuck in the wire and “doubled over.” She was having a miscarriage.
The Houston Chronicle had previously reported on the federal Border Patrol’s concern that the concertina wire would complicate rescues. On June 30, Fox News showed Border Patrol agents using shears to cut through the wire to reach migrants in the river.
A spokesperson from the Texas DPS provided the Houston Chronicle with a recent email from its director, Steven McCraw, to state troopers, in which he writes, “The purpose of the wire is to deter smuggling between the ports of entry and not to injure migrants,” although that has been a frequent result. McCraw continued, “The smugglers care not if the migrants are injured, but we do, and we must take all necessary measures to mitigate the risk to them including injuries from trying to cross over the concertina wire, drownings and dehydration.” A statement from the Texas governor’s office adds, “The absence of these tools and strategies—including concertina wire that snags clothing—encourages migrants to make potentially life-threatening and illegal crossings.”
The statement fails to mention the wire’s tendency to snag human flesh.
Abbott’s office denies that it has given “orders or directions… that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.”
Abbott’s officesaid it hasn't given any “orders or directions… that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally.” The emerging evidence, though, says otherwise. In its day-to-day operations in Eagle Pass and elsewhere, Texas’s state border management is upholding and rewarding troopers and guardsmen who block migrants seeking protection.
In 2021, Abbott launched what he calls “Operation Lone Star,” which has given police and those in the National Guard the power to arrest migrants and jail them for trespassing. At the same time, the state continues to build sections of a state-funded border wall.
Though the alleged orders to harm people in Eagle Pass came from Austin, and not Washington, the severity of these ongoing human rights violations demands that the Justice Department act to stop them. However, the Eagle Pass incidents are hardly the only case of government personnel ordered to inflict cruelty on asylum-seekers and other migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. The federal government does this, too.
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