If January is any sign of how this presidential election year will go, The Border Chronicle will need about 100 more reporters on the U.S.-Mexico border. Todd and I are a long way from that goal, but we do have some good news to share with you. Pablo de la Rosa, an excellent bilingual reporter from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, will be working with us this year and helping us reach a larger audience thanks to a grant from LION Publishers. De La Rosa is a freelance journalist and reports nationally for NPR and statewide for Texas Public Radio from the Texas-Mexico border. We are thrilled to be working with Pablo in 2024.
We also want to thank everyone who donated to our December fundraiser. With your help, we raised almost $1,000, which will go toward an investigation on border policing that we’ve wanted to do for some time. We will keep you updated on this project as it advances. Stay tuned.
And thank you to everyone who has signed up as a paid subscriber in January. We lost loads of subscribers in November and December because of expired credit cards, nonrenewals, and the news that Substack had Nazis on its platform. We are anti-Nazi, anti-fascist, pro-human decency, and pro-breakfast burrito. And we fight Nazis every day here on this platform. And as someone who lived in Texas for 20 years and worked in (and survived) the Texas Legislature, the den of vipers itself, I cede no territory to bullies or fascists. So please consider supporting us, and piss off the Nazis.
Texas is not a Trustworthy Partner: A Q&A with Eagle Pass Activist Amerika Garcia Grewal
“We have people dying here, blood on the ground. And the state of Texas seems to feel like this is OK.”
The border town of Eagle Pass, Texas, finds itself in an unenviable position this presidential election season: trapped between Texas governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration.
In November, Abbott endorsed Donald Trump for president, and there’s talk of him running as Trump’s vice presidential candidate. And as his police and soldier deployment to the Texas-Mexico border continues under Operation Lone Star (costing $4.5 billion and counting), Abbott has made Texas the very center of the MAGA movement, stoking xenophobic and nativist sentiment.
In the red-hot center is Eagle Pass, a normally quiet town of about 30,000 inhabitants that borders Piedras Negras, its sister city in Mexico. As migrants and asylum seekers have arrived in Eagle Pass, so have elected officials, political candidates, and even billionaire Elon Musk for photo ops and “border chaos” tours.
Abbott is doing everything possible to antagonize the Biden administration. In July he installed a floating buoy barrier on the river in Eagle Pass, and was promptly sued by the Biden administration; then, in October, Texas filed a lawsuit to prevent federal border agents from cutting or moving Operation Lone Star razor wire, which the Biden administration countered and won. Then, on January 10, Abbott further escalated tensions by instructing Texas National Guard to deny entry to federal Border Patrol agents at Shelby Park, a public park in Eagle Pass, which has access to the river. The move contributed to the tragic drowning deaths of a woman and her two children. And Abbott has instructed police and soldiers to arrest arriving asylum seekers for criminal trespassing.
Besides angling for a Trump vice-presidential nomination, many experts say, Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton would like to see the Supreme Court take up a challenge from Texas over immigration policy. If Texas got its way, thanks to Trump-appointed justices, states would be allowed to dictate their own immigration policies, no matter how draconian or inhumane.
Amid the scorched-earth politics are Eagle Pass residents like Amerika Garcia Grewal. She was born and raised in Eagle Pass and, nearly two years ago, moved back home to care for her mother and father. “Never in my life could I have imagined this,” she says of the town’s predicament. She helped form Border Vigil, made up of community members focused on humanizing the migrants arriving in their town. Each month they hold a vigil at Shelby Park, on the river, for those who died crossing the border. In December, Garcia Grewal and others erected nearly 700 wooden crosses at the park, one for each border fatality in 2023. Texas took over the park in early January, nearly ending the memorial’s closing ceremony, but Abbott allowed them access, and they were able to collect the crosses.
The Border Chronicle asked Garcia Grewal about how the political battles and Operation Lone Star have affected her community.
What’s it like for people living in Eagle Pass right now? What have you’ve been experiencing, starting with the state taking over Shelby Park?
I received a call on Wednesday night, January 10, from a volunteer that the state had closed the park. So, I drove down there, and Texas Military Department staff sergeant Suzanne Ringle came out to talk to me through the closed gate. And I told her for months we have been holding a service, down on the Shelby Park boat ramp, and we have a large-scale memorial up at the park, which we had permission to have there for one month. Dan McCuistion, a master woodworker, quite literally put blood, sweat and tears into these crosses. And I told Ringle we have people coming from Mexico and from other parts of Texas, to help us pack the crosses up at our closing service on Saturday. I asked her, what are we going to do if we don’t have access? She didn’t have any answers for me.
I came home and was really unhappy. Because we were being denied access. And because it’s very painful to live with the knowledge of all these deaths happening here. And that part of our country is saying about these deaths stuff like “That’s a good start,” or “Lock and load,” and things like that. The vigil has become a way for us to come together and realize we’re not alone and grieve what’s being lost, because it’s so much more than just the lives. It’s the common decency, the basic humanity, you know? Somebody died, and we don’t even know the names of a lot of these folks. And then that the Texas Military Department and Texas Department of Public Safety would just carelessly block off our access was disturbing.
Eagle Pass has received a lot of high profile visits, including more than 60 Republican elected officials, and House Speaker Mike Johnson. You even received a visit from Elon Musk. Does this help the town, and how do residents view these visits?
It’s very frustrating because they arrive at Shelby Park, they look around, they pose for the cameras, and then they’re gone. They don’t spend the night. Some of them even fly in. They don’t drive in and experience the checkpoints that we have to pass through. And we’re like, this is theater. This is a photo op. Not long ago, we had 64 congressional members visit, and the Texas Military Department said Shelby Park was sealed off for our own protection. But apparently it was safe enough for the congressional members to come down and walk around. So how is the park unsafe for me as a community member, but not for them? Whenever they feel like they need to rile up their base, they come down and they take their pictures, but they don’t stay. They don’t buy property here. They don’t contribute to the community. They don’t go to our churches, they don’t even go to our schools. In fact, there’s a lot of Customs and Border Patrol that don’t go to our schools, and they live here. There is a huge homeschooling group. The state of Texas is putting all this money into Operation Lone Star, but they’re not putting it into our schools. We don’t have a choir at our high school. We don’t have a lot of things that similar-sized schools will have in other parts of Texas.
Did you ask for a meeting with the congressional members when they visited?
Yes, we went to city council and asked if they could help with a meeting and they said they were not invited to speak with them either, so there was no invitation they could share. I also reached out to our pastors, but I was not able to find anybody in the community who had been invited to speak with them or be given an update by them.
What are your thoughts about the woman and the children who died after Texas blocked access to Border Patrol at Shelby Park?
When I got a copy of the Supreme Court filing, I noted that Texas was saying that Customs and Border Patrol could only enter Shelby Park and the river in “case of a lifesaving situation.” And I was thinking, there’s no way they could get there in time, because it takes time to get to the park, it takes time to get all the way to the boat ramp, load a boat into the water, and then get to whoever is in distress. I remember thinking, people are going to die.
And you know, I don’t like being right. Back in August of 2023, I told the city council, Texas is not a trustworthy partner. They are not acting in good faith. Time and time again, it’s been proven to be true. You know, I was saying, we should be worried about concertina wire on the Rio Grande. Because whatever we allow to be done to other people, someday it could happen to us. And now we have a Humvee sitting on the green at the golf course and concertina wire on the town side of the golf course, which is multiple coils high. I can’t imagine that Abbott and Texas would do such a thing at a country club in Dallas or Houston. Because the people of Dallas and Houston would be screaming bloody murder, but here we actually do have murders happening. We have people dying here, blood on the ground. And the state of Texas seems to feel like this is OK. That this is business as usual.
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