Border Patrol chief questions arrests of migrants
U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz says Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative, which calls for state authorities to arrest migrants on trespassing charges, is “a tremendous concern” and has slowed the process of returning migrants to their home countries.
“I really would prefer to see border security left to the border security experts,” Ortiz said in an interview with Texas Monthly. “I want other agencies’ help; I certainly need it at this time, but coordination has to happen. I understand wanting to ensure that there are consequences for people’s actions. But quite often the same person that was taken into custody for 30 days for trespassing could have already been repatriated back to their home country.”
Ortiz’s comments Thursday come several months into the governor’s border initiative, known as Operation Lone Star, which has seen thousands of Department of Public Safety troopers and Texas National Guard soldiers deployed to the border region amid a surge in migrant apprehensions there.
While border security and the enforcement of immigration law is typically left to the federal government, Abbott has argued that President Joe Biden’s policies have forced Texas to take unprecedented measures to help handle the escalation of migrant encounters. Ortiz told Texas Monthly that one of the key Donald Trump-era policies rescinded by Biden, which forced asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico until their court hearings in the U.S., was “one of the safest ways to manage the border environment.”
Since authorities began arresting migrants on state trespassing charges, the governor’s operation has run into a series of problems, with defense attorneys and advocacy groups accusing the state of trampling on the constitutional rights of hundreds of migrants, some of whom have sat in jail for weeks without being formally charged or appointed an attorney. Local officials also said they were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cases early in the operation, though Abbott has since sent grant funding to multiple counties that incurred border security-related costs.
Ortiz, asked to describe the effect that Abbott’s initiative has had on combating “the smuggling of migrants and drugs,” said the Border Patrol’s partnerships with Texas law enforcement agencies “have made a huge difference.” He quickly noted, however, that federal authorities were the ones that cleared some 16,000 migrants, most of them Haitian, from a makeshift refugee camp under the Del Rio International Bridge last month.
“(It) was only Border Patrol agents that were putting them on buses,” Ortiz told Texas Monthly. “Border Patrol agents were treating them for their medical conditions. We had help from some other agencies, but at the end of the day, that’s my responsibility; that’s our responsibility.”
Ortiz also questioned whether migrants arrested under the governor’s operation are given the opportunity to seek asylum. DPS has not said whether migrants are ever referred to federal authorities — the ones responsible for processing asylum claims — if migrants request asylum upon being arrested on state charges.
“I have to ensure that if migrants have a legitimate asylum claim that they’re able to put forth that claim, or if they have a credible fear claim with respect to some sort of trafficking abuse that there’s a pathway for them,” Ortiz said. “I don’t know that all of that is being considered when a migrant is apprehended by another agency.”
This month, Val Verde County Attorney David Martinez, the local misdemeanor prosecutor, said he had rejected or dropped trespassing charges against more than 40 percent of the migrants arrested in his county. Martinez said he decided not to proceed with many of those cases in which migrants appeared to have a “credible asylum claim” and had not tried to skirt law enforcement.
Martinez, a Democrat, said his approach is based on testimony from DPS Director Steve McCraw during a committee hearing in August, when McCraw said officers on the border are told to target criminals instead of those seeking asylum.
“That left the impression in my mind that if the facts in a case show that I’ve got somebody from a country that is being oppressed by their government, and that individual happens to walk across private property in search of law enforcement, well, Col. McCraw basically told me, that’s not the guy we want,” Martinez said.