Texican standoff: Inside the only border spot where law is enforced
http://nypost.com/2023/05/12/texican-standoff-inside-the-only-border-spot-where-law-is-enforced/
May 12, 2023
MATAMOROS, Mexico — For two red-hot weeks, this Mexican city across from Brownsville, Texas was the hottest spot for illegal immigration on the southern border.
But no more, thanks to a very unique, forceful and controversial Texas intervention that looks to become a long-term influence on national immigration policy.
Non-plussed by the empty threat of Title 42 expulsions in the final days of that hollowed-out policy tool, mostly Venezuelans in huge crowds in late April started surging into the Rio Grande water in numbers that have quickly reached some 10,000, pushing Brownsville into declaring a state of emergency.
By the time I got to town on Monday to cover Title 42’s end of days, immigrants coming off buses at the Matamoros station were still storming over the river, straight into the warm embrace of President Biden’s distant Border Patrol agents to receive the mythical reward of which they had all heard: the Biden government was processing most from riverbank to American heartland within 48 hours.
That video of pell-mell unopposed immigrant entrances onto Texas soil evidently so rankled Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, I have been reliably told, that he finally ordered something many constituents had been pressing for since the border crisis began on Biden’s Inauguration Day.
He put state troopers and a tactical National Guard Unit on a kind of Maginot Line of concertina wire hundreds of yards long with orders to let not even one pass.
Early the next morning, the whole ecosystem of what was going on had changed, and with it, possibly how the post-Title 42 face of border security will look like going forward, at least in its primary epicenter of Texas.
There on the 45-degree Texas riverbank, a line of some 50 immigrants, many with babies and small children, stood immobilized in their tracks, from the razor wire at the top of the steep bank all the way down into the water.
At the top, a coterie of Texas state troopers and National Guardsmen, all slung with weaponry, blocked their forward progress.
Some of the uniformed men were arguing with the immigrants at the highest point, while others shouting down to the rest while pointing back at the Matamoros bank, “Go back! Go Back! This is not a port of entry.”
And reinforcing a message that carrying children in this river was “peligroso,” dangerous.
Some who’d made it to the mid- and upper bank began tacking right along the silver coils of razor wire, looking for an alternative opening.
But the soldiers and state cops proved relentless in mirroring their lateral movement.
It didn’t matter how far the immigrants went, the soldiers synced along their side of the wire.
Down in the river, men and women carrying children and personal belongings in plastic bags also began walking waist-deep downstream also looking for an unopposed gap and didn’t find one.
Eventually, the entire group had no choice but to either sleep on the 45-degree steep, weed infested embankment with little food or water and no shelter, or return to Mexico, which is what they all did.
I Tweeted this remarkable footage, and it went viral almost immediately. With this move, a new Texas policy was born.
During a press conference Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas suggested the Texas operation was illegal and under review by the Department of Justice.
To no avail. Abbott doubled down, retweeting my video and having public affairs specialists push it on social media as a coup.
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Mad Poet Strikes Again.
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