BROWNSVILLE, Texas (Border Report) — Border crossers were surprised and peeved to see a cadre of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers on riot gear marching in formation and temporarily closing the international bridge on Tuesday in Brownsville, Texas.
Eighteen officers in wearing helmets with face shields marched in 30-degree weather to the Gateway International Bridge after Trump issued sweeping executive orders relating to immigration and keeping asylum-seekers south of the U.S. border.
Jaylee Cadriel, 19, from Brownsville, told Border Report that he was waiting in a car for his pregnant wife when CBP officers ordered him to leave the vicinity as the troops approached.
“I was over here parked right here waiting for my wife. She was crossing. And they didn’t even knock on my window or ask me politely or nothing. They just started screaming at me, ‘Get out of here! Get out of here! Go! Go!” said Cadriel, who is a U.S. citizen.
“I cross often,” he said. “I have never seen anything like this. This is the first time I’m seeing it and for the first time they were really rude. They didn’t want to talk to me politely and that kind of fired me up a little bit.”
A CBP official told Border Report the bridge was shut down for a short time during the exercise, which is called a “hardening exercise” and something that officers practice regularly.
However, officers marching on the city street for blocks is not something that has been seen here since the first Trump administration.
And Cadriel and others worry that it is sending a very public and threatening message to the border region.
“Everyone’s a Mexican. Even if you have your papers or not, they’re still Mexican but the way they act toward us is messed up. Texas was part of Mexico at one point so at least give us the respect we deserve,” he said.
One of the orders includes reinstating the Migrant Protection Protocols program, otherwise known as Remain in Mexico, which was a mainstay of Trump’s first presidency and which kept thousands of asylum-seekers from stepping foot in U.S. soil while their immigration proceedings played out. Many of the migrants lived in makeshift camps that formed near international bridges or filled shelters in dangerous Mexican border towns.
Matamoros, Mexico, was the site of one such camp, which formed near the foot of the Gateway International Bridge.
Mexican officials have discouraged migrants from living at the location and recently dismantled all remnants of the camp.
On Tuesday, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Benjamine Huffman, announced that the agency reinstated MPP, effective immediately.
In a statement, Huffman said, “The situation at the border has changed and the facts on the ground are favorable to resuming implementation of the 2019 MPP Policy.”
Also Tuesday, local shelters in Matamoros and Reynosa, Mexico were reportedly filling up with asylum-seekers who no longer knew how long they would be staying in the border.
Contributing to the confusion was another order Trump issued doing away with the CBP One app, which since 2023 allowed migrants to schedule asylum appointments at U.S. ports of entry, including the Gateway International Bridge.
Felicia Rangel-Samponaro, co-director of the Sidewalk School, a nonprofit that offers free schooling to children asylum seekers in several Mexican border cities, said she was in Reynosa on Monday and in Matamoros on Tuesday trying to help migrants affected by the changes.
“People are just in shock,” she told Border Report. “They’re trying to soak in the information.”
She says a group of migrants who had CBP One appointments for 6 a.m. Tuesday still went to the bridge hoping to be let in but were turned back. Most returned to the shelter, she said.
“People were just standing there like, ‘What happened?’ And there were a lot of rumors and misinformation going around on the ground,” she said.
She says one family that had an appointment in February told her they plan to stay at the shelter until that date and try it again, hoping they will get an asylum interview.
Contributing to the confusion she says is that the White House’s Spanish-language website was disabled.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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