EAGLE PASS, Texas — Juanita Martinez approached a closed gate at Shelby Park Tuesday afternoon and began an altercation with Texas National Guard soldiers. The young soldier said the park was closed to the public for “safety and security” reasons.
“Safety from what?” Martinez answered.
Martinez, chairman of the Maverick County Democratic Party, is one of many locals angry that their town has become the main stage in a national political drama. A record number of migrants crossed the Rio Grande in December, tens of thousands of them passing through Shelby Park, a 47-acre riverfront lawn and ball field. In response, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the military to occupy the park, primarily to deny access to Border Patrol agents who had previously used the park to process arriving migrants. However, this resulted in the park being closed to the public.
Mr. Abbott now plans to use the park for yet another political purpose. Mr. Abbott is scheduled to hold a news conference on Sunday with 14 other governors who have supported him in his standoff with the federal government, including Georgia's Brian Kemp and Iowa's Kim Reynolds.
In Mr. Martinez's view, Mr. Abbott's border security measures, including troops, barbed wire, shipping containers and river buoys, have done nothing to deter migrants, and December's record border crossings This is proof of that.
“This is a big scam and political propaganda,” she said. “What's our message to Abbott? Get the hell out of Maverick County, get the hell out of our park. We don't need you here.”
Local officials in Eagle Pass are overwhelmed on two fronts: the growing number of immigrants and the state's response to those immigrants. Mr. Abbott and other Republicans have argued that immigration at the border constitutes an “invasion.”
A city official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said the forces brought in by the governor included the National Guard, Texas Department of Public Safety personnel, and Florida State Troopers loaned by the state government. Stated. Gov. Ron DeSantis — Parked his car on the lawn, damaging the irrigation system at the Shelby Park public golf course. Repairs would strain the city's meager budget, officials added.
Gov. Abbott's press secretary, Andrew Mahallis, said in an emailed statement to NBC News on Friday that the state has allocated more than $11 billion in Texas taxpayer money and deployed thousands of National Guard troops and soldiers. We will put up strategic barriers and build our own border wall.”
Thanks to these efforts, they have apprehended more than 495,000 illegal immigrants and turned away more than 95,000 illegal immigrants, as well as millions of lethal doses of fentanyl and thousands of weapons. He said he had seized and arrested thousands of people. He added that in December, the majority of border crossings took place outside of Texas.
The Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to requests for comment.
Now city officials are nervous about the arrival of yet another potentially overwhelming force. It's a motorcade of Donald Trump supporters heading to what organizers call “taking back our borders.” Ahead of a rally scheduled for Saturday, self-proclaimed patriots began flocking to Eagle Pass early in the week, joining a convoy that so far was smaller than expected. Organizers originally expected hundreds of thousands of people to attend.
Some sheriffs in Texas have already asked officials not to show up.
Donna Austin and her husband, Jerry, drove more than five hours from north of Houston to “stand up not just for Texas, but for the entire country,” she said.
“I think a lot of criminals and pedophiles come across it,” she said. “I think there are people who need to come in and it's not being done right. They're just letting everyone in.”
In the context of ongoing Senate negotiations over a bipartisan border security bill, Austin has made it clear that he believes immigrants who leave their home countries “in desperation” should be given a chance to enter the United States. That position has been signaled by Joe Biden and some Democrats to the president's left.
Mr. Biden is pushing for legislation that would give him the power to “close the border” if the number of migrant arrests reaches an average of 5,000 per day over a week, or 8,500 per day. In practice, given recent arrest numbers, this means almost immediately giving the Border Patrol the power to turn back migrants who cross illegally between ports of entry, even if they are seeking asylum. There is a high possibility that it will.
Such laws may not reduce border crossings as intended, said Cardinal Theresa Brown, director of immigration policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former policy official at the Department of Homeland Security. A similar approach has been attempted twice so far. The first was President Trump's so-called Remain in Mexico program, and then Title 42, a pandemic-era measure that effectively ended asylum processing at the border from March 2020 to May 2023. In both cases, there was a temporary impact on migration flows, but ultimately the number of border apprehensions began to rise again.
More importantly, such a policy could only be implemented with extensive cooperation from the Mexican government, Brown said. This is something that Mexico has not shown any intention of implementing and is subject to the whims of Mexican politics. “As someone who has been involved in international affairs for many years, I can tell you that it is unwise to include laws that cannot be enforced without the cooperation of other countries,” Brown said.
Meanwhile, Border Patrol arrests in January were down more than 50% from December's record high. Experts attribute the changes to seasonal fluctuations that occur nearly every year, as well as a crackdown on migration routes by Mexican authorities following a visit by senior U.S. diplomats to Mexico City in late December.
Mission: Border Hope, the only migrant shelter in Eagle Pass, was nearly empty Thursday after hosting more than 18,000 migrants in December. Valeria Wheeler, the shelter's director, said she and her staff are a little relieved, but she prefers when the shelter is full.
“I wouldn't say this is a crisis,” Wheeler said. The numbers rise and fall with the seasons, but she has come to expect a peak. “It's a cycle.”
One of the few migrants at the shelter Wednesday was a woman who fled Colombia with her young son after receiving threats for her political activities. She requested anonymity for fear of retaliation against the family she left behind.
She said she didn't realize how controversial immigration is in U.S. politics and hadn't heard about Biden's desire to “close” the border. She left Colombia without a very clear idea of what awaited her once she arrived stateside.
“I decided to leave within three days,” she said. “I didn't have time to study.”
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