Helicopters and High-Speed Chases: Inside Texas’ Push to Arrest Migrants

BRACKETTVILLE, Texas – Magdaleno Ruiz Jimenez crouched under a waxing moon in the rough bushes of a Texas ranch. His journey to the tiny border community of Brackettville had been long, some 1,300 miles from his home in Mexico. But now a drone was buzzing overhead.

A lone officer, Sgt. Ryan Glenn, emerged from the darkness. He had a flashlight and a screen with coordinates where Mr. Jimenez and six other men could be found on the cold caliche, lumps of heat visible to an infrared camera on the overhead drone. More officers soon arrived.

“I spent everything to get here,” said Mr. Jimenez after the officers pulled him and the other men out of the undergrowth.

The men believed they had been arrested by immigration officials for illegally entering the United States. You were wrong. Instead, they were arrested by Texas State Police for trespassing on a huge private ranch

For several months now, Texas has sought to reuse state law enforcement tools to curb the sudden surge in people entering illegally.

To do this, Texas officials, led by Governor Greg Abbott, devised a way to circumvent the fact that enforcement of immigration services is a job for the federal government: state and local law enforcement agencies work with frontier farm owners and use trespassing laws, to arrest migrants who leave their land.

“It’s an effective way of getting a message across,” said Mr. Abbott, flanked by nine other Republican governors, at a press conference at the border this fall. “If you enter the state of Texas illegally, the chances are high that you will not be caught and released, but arrested and detained.”

The new approach is based on the involvement of local officials and has so far only been used in two of the state’s 32 border regions: Kinney, which includes Brackettville, and Val Verde, its western neighbor.

State officials couldn’t say what impact, if any, the program had on reducing illegal crossings, which have risen to at least 1.2 million in Texas this year, the highest number in more than two decades. (It remains unclear how many migrants attempt to cross the border multiple times.) But the operation has life for both the migrants involved in its ad hoc trials and the rural dwellers living under its web , upside down.

Perhaps nowhere is this more felt than in the town of Brackettville, a 1,700-inhabitant former border outpost known for its surrounding hunting and cattle ranches, an ancient fortress that once housed the Army’s Black Seminole scouts, and an aging replica of the Alamos they were built for a John Wayne movie.

It has recently been inundated by the state police.

High-speed car chases are so common that the local school put in rock barriers to guard against falls. Helicopters patrol the night sky. Mostly white ranchers lock their doors and carry pistols on their own property, which many have never done before. City residents, most of whom are poor and Hispanic, complain that they are routinely persecuted by officers newly deployed to the area.

“It happens to a lot of people here in Brackett,” said Mayor Eric Martinez, nicknamed the town. He said he was followed and then stopped after leaving a city council meeting because the official said his license plate lights were not bright enough.

The police push is part of an ongoing argument between Mr Abbott and the Biden administration over how to deal with the sudden surge in arrivals at the border with Mexico. Federal agents were quick to evict migrants as part of a public health ordinance, but Mr Abbott argues that the government has done little to stop the influx of them. He has allocated $ 3 billion to a variety of actions along the border, including deploying state police and Texas State Guard troops, building a border barrier using shipping containers, and using the National Guard to build several miles of fences along the Rio Grande.

But the arrests of migrants for criminal trespassing have been a more disruptive element of the so-called Operation Lone Star, which has overcrowded courts and local prison inmates and alerted defenders and lawyers for migrants.

A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman declined to comment on the initiative, and federal agents are not working with state police to make trespassing arrests.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Democrat from San Antonio, called for a state investigation into Operation Lone Star and said in a letter to the Justice Department in the fall that the program “devastated the Texas judicial system” and “directly results in a violation of state law and law constitutional rights to due process. “

The men arrested under the program, around 2,000 so far, are often detained for weeks without access to a lawyer. More than 1,000 are currently in state prisons that have been converted to house them. (Women and children were turned over to federal agents.)

Since the process is new and takes place in small rural counties, the usual system of hiring criminal defense lawyers is overwhelmed. Kinney County also struggled to file arrest files in the time required by law.

Once arrested, the migrants are transferred to a single processing center, a large tent, in the border town of Del Rio – where a flood of Haitian migrants flooded the community earlier this year – and then transferred to the converted state prisons in other districts.

While the state police check the identity papers of the arrested, the men are only handed over to the federal authorities after their cases have been completed, which previously often took several months. Among those who have gone before a judge, most cases have been dismissed or bailed while awaiting hearings, their lawyers said.

And many of the asylum seekers released have been allowed to stay in the United States to prosecute their cases, unlike those arrested by federal authorities at the border because of the public health rule, which is rushed, defense lawyers said Expulsion used by migrants is newcomers, not those who are already in the country.

More than 50 Kinney County’s ranchers have registered with the Texas Department of Public Security to allow state police to patrol their property and arrest people for trespassing, the agency said.

In interviews, ranchers who signed up for the program described feeling increasingly unsafe on their own land because of the potential for encountering groups of migrants, even though none of the ranchers said they had been attacked or threatened. They share information on Facebook and text messages, and share stories of the latest “bailout” – a well-known local term for the end of a police chase in which migrants attempt to escape from a car or truck, often after it crashes is.

Bill and Carolyn Conoly sat on the oak-shaded patio of their ranch, a couple of cattle walking slowly nearby said the situation this year was the worst they could remember.

“We’re always repairing,” said Mr. Conoly, referring to bent or cut ranch fences. “We keep the doors locked and I have a gun at my disposal.”

Motion-activated cameras on the ranch take pictures of migrants passing by, information that helps state police locate them. Earlier that day, cameras had caught a large group walking through the Conoly family ranch. Police caught up with the migrants at night on a neighboring ranch – 14 men and one woman.

For months, the Conolys have also had cops from Galveston, south of Houston and about 370 miles away, in their white stucco guest house.

“I don’t know if it makes a difference,” said one of the constables, Lt. Paul Edinburgh, who had never been to the border before. “But it’s better than sitting on the couch and reading about it.”

A row of State Highway Patrol SUVs sat outside the city’s only gas station at around 9 p.m. one weekend evening when two police officers parked nearby ushered a woman from her car and removed her handcuffs.

The woman, an American citizen, was caught transporting 10 undocumented people in a pickup truck, officials said a crime. However, since Kinney County had no room for women, she was given a court date and was released.

Shortly afterwards, an officer used a drone to locate a group of men on a nearby ranch. Sergeant Glenn, who led a team of seven officers that night, looked for clues on the ground. It was then that he found Mr. Jimenez, the man who had traveled from Chiapas, Mexico.

As a job-seeking house painter, Mr Jimenez had tried to cross the border once before in August. After being rejected, he raised more money and paid to cross again – 150,000 pesos, he said, or about $ 7,000.

“There is almost no work. They suffer, ”he said of the people in Chiapas, a Mexican state on the border with Guatemala. Now, with all of the money he’d spent crossing it, he wouldn’t have enough to return home. (It is currently held on a $ 2,500 bond.)

As the officers waited for their prisoner transport – rented white vans with no official badges – they received a motion warning from a camera deep in another ranch. It was 12:20 p.m.

The police vehicles bumped along overgrown ranch roads. A helicopter hovered over what appeared to be three migrants, but ran out of gas.

The officers arrived at a locked gate and decided to break the lock. When they couldn’t go any further with the car, they set off. But after a long hike through rough terrain and a meticulous search in the thorny undergrowth, no one could be found.