Remembering Del Rio, September 2021

When I Bore Witness to the True Barbarians at the Gate

In the late summer and fall of 2021, now vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19, I was back on the US-Mexico border to resume my interrupted road trip across the line from Brownsville to Tijuana. Having studied the evolution of the US immigration system throughout my imposed coronavirus isolation, I was on the hunt for solutions to fixing what everyone agrees is “broken,” still hopeful of finding a happy ending to my forthcoming book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands (June 2024).

I’d been in Texas for about a month: volunteering in shelters, welcome centers, and respite facilities; interviewing faith- and community-based leaders; and collecting testimonies from survivors of the deterrence-to-detention-to-deportation pipeline. Mid-month, I was in McAllen, working in the free pharmacy of Sister Norma Pimentel’s Humanitarian Respite Center when I heard the news that a population of 15,000 asylum seekers was trapped upriver under a bridge.

As I handed out aspirin, soap, hair ties and combs, toothpaste and brushes, and, in one case, a spritz of perfume to the road-weary asylum seekers, my phone buzzed unceasingly in my pocket, announcing urgent news. As soon as I could pull away, I discovered image upon image, sent through my various WhatsApp chat groups, of safety seekers stranded in unspeakable conditions, without food and water. Their only escape from the punishing South Texas sun was the shade of the international bridge at Del Rio. 

I opened my news feed. The headlines of all major media outlets parroted the keywords of demagogues and fear-mongers: A “surge” of “illegal aliens” had encamped at the doorstep of the USA. Fox News and Breitbart — the only so-called news agencies allowed under the bridge with cameras — insisted it was “an invasion!”

In the reality-based world, their cries didn’t pass the smell test. We live in an era of high-tech border surveillance, where drones police the skies with cameras for eyes, and blimps can “see” for thousands of miles in all directions. It defied credulity that a crowd the size of that attending a Friday night Texas high school football game could have arrived en masse and crossed the line undetected. Fifteen thousand people didn’t just show up, overnight. It took time for them to gather there.

Were they funneled there, deliberately? I had reason to suspect they were.

The week before, while working with Pastor Abraham Barberi at his Matamoros shelter, Dulce Refugio, I received a message from a Nigerian man named Bright. Pastor Abraham and I were out food shopping for shelter residents when Bright texted from Tampico, a city on the Gulf of Mexico located at the southernmost end of the department of Tamaulipas, 600 miles due south of Matamoros. He was on his way to the border. Could I direct him to a safe place to shelter?

Pastor Abraham agreed to take him in. We told Bright to buy a bus ticket to Matamoros and to text us with an arrival time so we could meet him at the bus station. We expected him later that day. But when he next texted, it was from Monterrey. He’d traveled too far west, overshooting Matamoros by miles and losing precious hours. I thought he must have misunderstood our instructions, catching a bus to the wrong town that started with “M.” But no. He said he’d only been permitted to buy a ticket to Ciudad Acuña — the Mexican border town directly across from Del Rio.

“They say the border is open there,” Bright told us. 

“Who told you that?” Abraham and I asked. 

“The bus company.”

Fast-forward one week, and roughly 15,000 Black travelers in search of safety had pooled up under the Acuña-Del Rio International bridge, among them was Bright. Could this so-called invasion have been planned? If so, by whom?

Two months earlier, in July, the Spanish-language news outlet El País reported that Haitians seeking asylum in Mexico had reached 19,000 — a historic number and higher than any other nation group. The safety seekers were stuck in Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala, unable to continue northward due to a backlog in processing transit papers. Frustrations were mounting. By early September, they’d taken to the streets to protest the prolonged wait.

Haitians have been on the move since 2010 when a massive earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince, killing over 200,000 people instantly before a cholera outbreak took 10,000 more. Many traveled to Brazil where jobs were plentiful on the construction sites of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic stadiums. When Jair Bolsonaro kicked the guest workers out, they moved on to Chile, the most robust South American economy until the pandemic. Shutdowns caused scarcity and job competition, and a surge of anti-Black violence propelled the Haitian refugee community forward once again. 

In 2021, they still could not return home. Even US Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas agreed that Haiti was unlivable. On May 22 of that year, he announced Temporary Protected Status for Haitians living in the US, shielding them from the threat of deportation for the next 18 months. The July assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse threw the island nation into chaos, leading to gang rule. And just five weeks after that, on August 14, another devastating earthquake flattened the country’s southern departments.

The best choice for Haitians in the diaspora was to join family and friends in the US. 

Following the early September Tapachula protests, the valve had been opened and Haitians in search of life were on the move. This time, however, an invisible hand appeared to be directing them to Ciudad Acuña, then across the Rio Grande to a Del Rio floodplain where both natural and man-made border fortifications stopped them from advancing any further.

On September 17, 2021, between requests for water and statements of, “I’m parched,” Del Rio’s Democratic Mayor Bruno Lozano read his Emergency Local Disaster Declaration before passing out in the heat. As the sun set that day, Texas Senator Ted Cruz tweeted that “10,503 illegal aliens” were under the bridge, up from 700 on September 8th. Ted had been keeping track.

So had the manager at La Cabañita, a Ciudad Acuña taqueria, where the television is set to a live feed of the international bridge all day long. He had first noticed a crowd growing there two weeks before. He’d watched as tents and other rudimentary shelters went up, mattresses and port-a-potties went in, toys and trash piled up. Folks had been accumulating, perhaps quickly. But they had not arrived without knowledge. They certainly did not just show up overnight as Cruz and Fox News would have us believe. 

In a September 16 YouTube monologue, Democratic Judge Lewis Owens of Val Verde County, in which Del Rio sits, revealed that local officials knew 45 days earlier that a caravan of migrants was projected to land in Del Rio. Yet Greg Abbott convinced Mayor Lozano to declare an emergency so he could “surge all available resources” to the otherwise sleepy border town of 35,000.

Of course, Abbott did not mean medics, sandwiches, and water trucks. He meant “100s of National Guard soldiers and 1000s of state troopers” called from all points to support the Border Patrol cowboys even then wielding reins like whips to keep asylum seekers from setting foot on US soil.

If thousands of people were already encamped under a bridge with more on the way and Governor Abbot was promising weapons over welcome, I figured local humanitarians would need extra hands. I jumped in my rental car and set out on the 350-mile, six-hour drive to Del Rio, stopping only at the nearest Target to buy a toothbrush, toothpaste, a package of underwear, a change of clothes, and the biggest bottle of water I could find. I pulled into Eagle Pass, 60 miles to the south of Del Rio, at about 9:00 p.m. My plan was to bunk down there and continue into Mexico in the light of day. But I found no vacancy anywhere — I tried at least 10 hotels.

I kept rolling to Del Rio, stopping only at a food truck advertising the “Best Tacos in Texas” just moments before closing time. I ordered the chef’s favorite: con pollo asado en salsa verde, placed the bag containing the to-go container on the passenger’s seat, and kept going. I resolved to get as close as I could to the Acuña-Del Rio International Bridge, find a place to park, and eat my late dinner picnic in the car.

On Texas State Loop 239, I hit the red-and-white temporary barricades put in place by the Texas Department of Traffic (DOT). “Port of Entry Closed” flashed the electric roadsign in yellow neon letters. Greg Abbott had shuttered the International Bridge, depriving the state of Texas — which boasts the largest percentage of medically uninsured and ranks close to the bottom in public school performance — of billions of dollars in daily revenue. The reason? He said he feared the safety seekers might bomb their only source of shade.

I made a U-turn, determined to get under the bridge — since I couldn’t go over it. A left turn at the Border One Stop Gas and Mexican Cafe, another left on Las Vacas Loop Road, then a left onto Frontera Road at the Bush Jr-era border fortification, and I’d forged a square that dead-ended just feet from 239 and the foot of the bridge. It rose into the sky in a blaze of light. I was shocked by its span and how the floodplain beneath it dropped so dramatically in elevation.

I backed into the driveway of an unused building directly across from a wide open gate in the border wall and killed the engine. On this lonely, industrial stretch of road, the night began calm. It was just me, a TV camera crew complete with a female talking head dressed in heels and a white dress, who soon left, and a single National Guardsman dressed in military camouflage. A rifle draped over his head and across his right shoulder pointed to the ground. He stood patrol over the open gate, unmoved by my presence, if he noticed me at all. 

Before I swallowed my last bite of tacos con pollo asado, Abbott’s military build-up against a “foe” of 15,000 unarmed safety seekers began.

First came the Border Patrol pickup trucks and SUVs. Then came the National Guard and DOT vehicles. Peppered among all came hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Texas State Troopers. Construction trucks rolled in and out of the gate, along with the occasional garbage hauler. Helicopters roared into the scene, descending from the sky to shatter all calm. It was as if Greg Abbott was preparing for war.

Throughout the long night came the constant, unrelenting parade of BlueBird buses, the kind used to ferry suburban children from home to school. But these were not yellow. They were white, with blank tinted windows never lowered more than about six inches from the top. Driven by ICE, the only way to know if they held human cargo was if you chanced to see the first two digits of four human fingers clutching the window glass at the top. Sometimes the whites of human eyes peered out the cramped window opening, too.

Vehicles came and came, hour after middle-of-the-night hour. How wonderful for organized crime, I thought, to have a night off from dodging law enforcement. Cops all over Texas were en route here; they arrived screaming, sirens blazing, roof lamps turning, flashing. The Val Verde ambulance corp screeched to the scene as well, the EMTs yelling “Let us through, let us through” at the increasingly longer corridor of trucks and SUVs that lined the two sides of Frontera, blocking my exit. 

The arrival of law enforcement inevitably brought the vigilantes. When a green-and-white Border Patrol truck ferried a heavily pregnant woman through the border wall gate and into the hands of the Val Verde Emergency Medical Team, a Tucker Carlson wannabe descended on the woman, heckling her. Another man recorded faux-Carlson’s rant about how Greg Abbott wasn’t man enough — wasn’t mean enough — to expel this laboring woman from the border without delay. How dare Abbott allow the alien to have a baby here, in my country, in my state! 

“I’m going to send the National Guard,” faux-Carlson said, mocking the alt-right governor. “The National Guard don’t even have bullets. They can’t shoot these people!”

When the sun rose over the horizon on September 19, Abbott’s intentions for Mayor Lozano’s emergency declaration were revealed: On the other side of border wall, at the shores of the Rio Grande, stood a mile-long line of state police and other law enforcement vehicles — 700-1000 in all: A barricade of engine-humming metal meant to deter other asylum seekers from stepping onto US soil where they had the right, under international and US law, to request protection; a show-of-force against folks in medical distress, starving, thirsty, in need of safety and rest — all for the benefit of cameras owned and operated by Breitbart and Fox News. A show-of-force that was meaningless, really, because the border is in the middle of the Rio Grande. Even at the water’s edge, where that same day cameras caught Border Patrol mounted cowboys hurling reins and racial invective, the wanderers had made it to the so-called Promised Land. 

It was political theater by the same man who has since booby-trapped buoys with barbed wire and circular saw blades and made it illegal to offer humanitarian assistance to people in need. Yet, Biden and Mayorkas caved to the craven appetites of the US Border Patrol and far-far-right.

Within a matter of days, all 15,000 people were gone, many of them air-lifted back to a country roiled by gang rule and violence. In 12 days, 58 ICE Air expulsion flights landed in a country little able to receive them and without the infrastructure to mitigate COVID-19 exposure by a Democratic president, mayor, county judge, and DHS secretary, who were caught by the balls and swept up in the Fox News propaganda empire.

In the first 12 months of his administration, Biden expelled nearly as many Haitians by air as were expelled during the previous 20 years and three presidencies combined. Another estimated 8,000 Haitians seeking asylum in the US fled back to Mexico in September of 2021. Secretary Mayorkas called it, “voluntary departure.” It rarely ever is.

Needless to say, the happy ending I went searching for was not to be. Greg Abbott is still at large when he should be behind bars. And the soul of the US nation, where immigration is concerned, remains as dark as ever.

In a security-first world, there is no room for human rights.