Migration surge has little impact on daily life in Texas border towns
MCALLEN — Amid the spike in migrant crossings this summer, Gov. Greg Abbott has declared several border counties disaster areas, started construction of a state-funded fence and dispatched state troopers and the National Guard to the border.
Local politicians have raised fears that the migrants will spread COVID-19, fill jails and overwhelm police departments.
Yet the surge has had little impact on the daily lives of Texans living along the Mexican border.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the quiet blocks surrounding the migrant shelter operated by Catholic Charities in downtown McAllen, a city of 145,000 that is a crossroads for tens of thousands of people who cross the border without documents.
“We’ve never really had migrants walking up and down the streets of downtown,” Mayor Javier Villalobos said. “They pass through here and they go.
“Ninety-eight percent of people in McAllen have never seen the immigrants,” Villalobos said. “We want to keep it that way.”
McAllen’s city center was quiet on a recent morning. Only a few people wandered the sidewalks near the migrant shelter. Several retirees sipped coffee at tables on the sidewalk outside a food court, deep in conversation.
“We don’t have any problem with these people coming. They are human beings like us,” said Oralia Gonzalez, 68, a retired maintenance worker who migrat
ed legally from Mexico decades ago. “It’s being wellmanaged.”
Behind the counter in her small jewelry store, Silvia Vargas said the migrants don’t really make a difference to her business. Far more damaging, she said, was the closure of the border to most legal Mexican visitors, a pandemic precaution put in place by President Donald Trump and continued by his successor, Joe Biden.
Still, Vargas said, television news reports about a spike in illegal crossings have unsettled her.
“People can’t come across legally, so why can these people come across like this?” asked Vargas, who was born in the U.S. and raised mostly in Mexico.
Some 300 miles separate McAllen, near the southern tip of Texas, from the border town of Del Rio to the northwest. The stretch offers a multitude of crossing opportunities and is the focus of a military-style crackdown involving thousands of Border Patrol agents, National Guard members, troopers and sheriff ’s deputies.
The pandemic shutdown and tighter border controls that began under Trump have created pent-up demand to cross the Rio Grande. Smugglers have taken advantage. They’ve been largely left alone by Mexico’s security forces, including at well-known crossing points on the river.
“It’s much more lucrative to smuggle humans than narcotics,” said Ramon Gonzalez, acting police chief in La Joya, a town of 5,000 a few miles upriver from McAllen that has long served as a smuggling corridor.
Gonzalez said his night shift officers have been spending nearly all their time this year pursuing smugglers or raiding safe houses rather than doing regular police duties.
“It’s just the whole influx of people,” he said. “You get tied up dealing with them when we can be out doing something else.”
Passing through
More than a quarter of the nearly 213,000 migrants detained and processed by U.S. border agents in July were repeat offenders — people who were previously caught and returned to Mexico and who were trying again. Most were quickly expelled.
Nearly 4 in 10 of the migrants were adults and their small children traveling together. Almost 19,000 others were minors traveling alone.
Those trying to evade Border Patrol agents — mostly single adults with little chance of obtaining permission to enter legally — cross in a variety of locations along the Rio Grande. Many are held in safe houses in Texas border towns until they can be smuggled north in vehicles or on foot.
Damaged fences and ranch buildings bear witness to their presence. So do police pursuits of smugglers’ vehicles, which sometimes lead to high-speed chases and deadly crashes.
But most of the families and children intent on surrendering to U.S. authorities cross the border at a few locations used by the criminal gangs that control smuggling routes through Mexico.
Unaccompanied minors are sent to crowded federal detention facilities to await release to relatives or other sponsors in the U.S.
Of migrants traveling as families, about half are returned to Mexico or sent back to their countries of origin in Central America. The rest are given court dates to pursue their immigration cases and are then released to relatives or to immigrant aid agencies, which help them arrange transportation to destinations in this country.
Few migrants released from custody on the U.S. side of the border hang around the area for long.
“The migrants that pass through here stay in the downtown area,” said Michael Smith, a Methodist minister who is director of the Holding Institute, a migrant shelter not far from the international bridge in Laredo. “I have had very few people wanting to stay in Laredo. The Tex-Mex culture is very different from that of these people.”
The mass crossings by families and teenagers “affect mostly people who have property at those crossing points,” said Clarissa Gonzalez, a businesswoman and local journalist in Roma, a border town of 11,000 people 55 miles upriver from McAllen.
Roma has been a major migrant destination this year.
“Well, sorry, if you own property on the river, you could have expected that,” Gonzalez said.
The more significant problem, she said, are single adult migrants who try to evade capture by U.S. authorities — either because they have a prior U.S. criminal record or because they know they have no chance of qualifying for asylum.
Many such migrants spend days in so-called stash houses run by smugglers in residential neighborhoods until they can be spirited north on foot or in vehicles.
“The big groups are literally turning themselves in,” Gonzalez said. “But the other folks are the ones who are really, truly upsetting the local community.”
In Del Rio, hotel rooms are scarce, as are seats on trains, planes and buses. So migrants released there by the Border Patrol must fend for themselves on the streets, sparking anger among many residents.
“I’m not going to lie. It’s a struggle,” said Tiffany Burrow, operations director for the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition in Del Rio, a volunteer organization that has been arranging transportation to the U.S. heartland for about 100 migrants a day.
Border political leaders say the resurgence of COVID-19 has made it all the more urgent to curtail illegal crossings. But Burrow said the migrants her group has dealt with this summer — from Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti, rather than Central America or Mexico — report that they have been vaccinated.
Of migrants on four chartered buses that departed recently from Del Rio, less than 3 percent tested positive for COVID-19 at their destinations, she said.
In McAllen, officials reported a test positivity rate of 12 percent among asylum seekers.
By comparison, the positivity rate for residents in Harris County is about 21 percent.
“And yet there is great discrimination against them based on that incorrect belief,” Burrow said of the migrants.
Well-oiled machine
A mid-August sliver of moon had just set when a dozen flashlights moving along the brushy Mexican
bank signaled the presence of migrants preparing to cross the Rio Grande by raft near Roma.
“Stay calm, stay calm,” a wading smuggler told the raft’s 15 occupants as he pushed and pulled them across the waist-deep stream. “Nothing is going to happen, God willing. Be careful with the children. They are the most important thing.”
A half-mile upstream, a Border Patrol searchlight mounted on a tall tower swept the river and the Mexican shore with its powerful beam. Still farther upstream, other rafts crossed the water.
This small stretch of border was the focal point of the migration surge in March, when news photographers and reporters documented the crossings. The media attention has long since faded. But the migrants continue coming, often by the hundreds each night.
At this crossing, several Texas National Guard members watched in silence as the rafts approached U.S. soil.
A Mexican smuggler called out, asking where he should unload his human cargo. After a brief silence, a guard member murmured “here” in Spanish and waved a flashlight to indicate a submerged concrete ramp.
Once the migrants climbed ashore, their guide told them to say aloud a numerical code. The women and children responded — “Cinco! Five!” — while the guide’s assistant recorded with his smartphone. The exercise appeared to be a way for the smugglers to prove their clients had arrived safely, for purposes of collecting payment from their relatives back home.
The guide instructed the arrivals to walk along the riverbank to where the guard members were waiting. There, the migrants were lined up, counted and directed down a rutted dirt road toward the edge of downtown Roma.
At the end of the road was a locked ranch gate. There, the migrants waited calmly for the Border Patrol to arrive, load them on buses and take them away for processing.
The only sound that greeted them was the barking of dogs from nearby houses.