AUSTIN (Nexstar) — According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (USCBP), border agents has 11,709 “encounters” in February and 11,017 in March. Encounters refers to the amount of people not lawfully in the country that USCBP apprehended or those who have turned themselves into a port of entry and are deemed “inadmissible.”
From October 2021 to December 2024, the Biden administration had 186,825 encounters per month, 94% more than the 11,363 average in Trump’s first two months back in office.
“We’re just in the first 100 days, so we’ve got a lot of wait-and-see,” Retired Sheriff Clint McDonald said. McDonald used to work directly on the border and has 42 years of law enforcement experience. He now serves as the Executive Director of both the Southwest Border Sheriff’s Coalition (SWBSC) and the Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition (TBSC). “The immigration problem will not be fixed overnight. It’s never been worked on. Every administration has kicked it on down the road to let somebody else worry about. It’s going to take both houses of Congress and the White House to fix the immigration problem.”
This week in Austin, the SWBSC is having their bi-annual meeting. This year, the topic of conversation is how everything is evolving rapidly.
“Once Trump took office, the numbers dropped drastically,” Zavala County Sheriff Eusevio Salinas Jr. said. “Now, you actually see border patrol working the fields out looking for people. Back then you couldn’t get a border patrol agent to help you, because they were always in the processing center. It is night and day.”
As the amount of people attempting to cross the border appears to dwindle, Salinas Jr. expressed concerns about a potential cut-back in forces. Last month, Gov. Greg Abbott announced the closing of an Operation Lone Star booking facility in Jim Hogg County. Salinas Jr. hopes the similar facilities he relies on get shut down.
“You still have the aftermath from this… all the arrests for human smuggling, those cases haven’t come to court yet,” he said. “I have 48 inmates at a processing center for the Val Verde center, and we’ve been told that it might close. If it does close, it’s going to put my county in a real bind because of the fact that I’m very limited on bed spaces. I would have to find a county that would take those inmates at local tax dollars cost — not the state, not the federal government.”
Adding to his concern is bills within the Texas legislature to require longer stays in jail. Specifically, Senate Joint Resolution 1 would remove the option of bond for people accused of a felony if they’re in the country illegally.
“If we had the bed space available, it would be beneficial. But since we don’t have the bed space, where are we going to put these individuals? My county only provides 66 beds for the county,” Salinas Jr. said. “Currently, I have about 58 local inmates in my county jail. So that means that on a given day, if I catch 10 individuals that are illegally into this country, where am I going to house those individuals, and for how long of a period?”
On Tuesday morning, the SWBSC plans to hear from Abbott, who declared bail reform an emergency item this legislative session.
“We met with the governor before,” Salinas Jr. said. “He said that the processing center would not be closed. We need these operations.”
Read: Read More