EAGLE PASS, Texas — The strong show of force that Mexican military and federal police displayed at the border last week in an effort to deter illegal migration was short-lived as all signs of security forces have since vanished.
Mexican vehicles put on a show at the border Thursday following an agreement that Coahuila Gov. Miguel Ángel Riquelme Solís struck with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott days earlier, vowing to be more aggressive blocking migrants from making it to the river and streaming across into the United States.
But by Friday, the caravan of vehicles that had been on site at the riverbank was gone. Migrants were streaming across the river throughout the area. On Saturday afternoon, a family of 10 from Venezuela waded across the Rio Grande and made it to the shore then surrendered to National Guard and Border Patrol agents. Other migrants dashed out into the water as soon as the solo Mexican police vehicle in eyesight disappeared from the area.
“I guess that was all a show. The [Coahuila] governor put out those vehicles so that Governor Abbott could say, ‘Hey, he’s doing something. He’s living up to the agreement that we signed,’ which was basically, ‘Hey, I’m going to provide more security on the border to try to keep immigrants from crossing the river,'” Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas said during an interview at his office Friday evening.
Abbott announced on April 6 that Texas state troopers from the Texas Department of Public Safety would begin conducting safety checks on all commercial trucks coming in from Mexico. The move was in response to the Biden administration’s plan to stop expelling people who illegally crossed the border, a policy known as Title 42 that was implemented at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Behind closed doors, the Biden administration fears a “mass migration event” that could entail 18,000 people encountered each day when Title 42 ends May 23.
But the inspections had a significant impact on port of entry operations, delaying and preventing thousands of trucks from entering the U.S. Governors from the four Mexican states that border Texas agreed to dramatically boost security at the border in return for Abbott’s ending the inspections. The Coahuila governor sent dozens of police and military to Piedras Negras as a show of force a week later in what has since turned out to be a publicity stunt, much like what critics accused Abbott of doing with the truck inspections.
The 29,000-person town of Eagle Pass has been left to pick up the pieces, disheartened that Coahuila did not seem interested in holding up its end of the bargain, thus forcing the city to gear up to handle reports from Piedras Negras that 10,000 to 20,000 people were already waiting in Piedras Negras for Title 42 to end.
“I was talking with a captain in the U.S. Army. We’re talking about setting up a staging area since Border Patrol can only process so many individuals at the Border Patrol stations. So if we get that influx of over 10,000, where will we have them? We can’t have them all over the place. So we need a controlled space. So we’re coming up with a plan,” Salinas said. “We want to make sure that we’re prepared for that and not have a chaotic situation like in Del Rio, Texas, when you had over 10,000 Haitians, and then the mayor over there had to close the bridge.”
Border Patrol, he said, had suggested a massive staging area at the publicly owned nine-hole golf course located directly on the border, to which he responded “hell no.”
The closure of ports of entry between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras would cost Eagle Pass $1 million in lost bridge fees to the city each week, Salinas said.
Eagle Pass is already struggling to accommodate the record-high number of migrant releases. More than 1,000 people are being encountered crossing the border each day and 500 are released to a nonprofit organization in town daily, meaning half the town’s population will be released in town in a two-week period. Eagle Pass faces a conundrum now that Mexican forces have walked back the dog and pony show especially since an additional 1,000 people have been observed crossing the border each day in recent weeks, but due to limited resources, the Border Patrol was not able to stop them, he said.
Roughly 7,500 people were encountered along the entire 2,000-mile southern border daily in March, including 1,000 in Eagle Pass alone. People are choosing to travel to this part of the border because it is somewhat safer on the Mexico side than other places like Nuevo Laredo and Juarez.
“Eagle Pass has become the epicenter of this crisis. An otherwise small, relatively sleepy town has been consumed into this border crisis. And it simply doesn’t have the infrastructure to handle things,” said Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-Texas. “We saw what happened in Del Rio … with the Haitians under the bridge. That moment hasn’t really stopped. The only difference is instead of tens of thousands of people in one spot, they’ve kind of spread it out, if you will.”
Sailnas recently met with and asked Piedras Negras Mayor Sonia Villarreal that security forces in her city help “funnel” people to the bridges so as to avoid more people crossing illegally between the bridges and angering Abbott into restarting truck inspections and costing the town needed toll dollars.
Salinas welcomed Abbott’s offer to have buses transport migrants released from federal custody to Washington, D.C., but he said only two buses with a total of less than 40 people have taken the governor up on his offer when roughly 3,500 people are being released each week.
* story by The Washington Examiner
