DPS clears its officials in actions at border
WASHINGTON — The Texas Department of Public Safety has found no wrongdoing by agency officials after six troopers working for Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security initiative alleged mistreatment of migrants this summer.
The agency’s inspector general found that most of the incidents raised by the troopers did happen, but concluded that DPS officials did not violate law or agency policy.
“Most of the concerns that precipitated these administrative investigations occurred to varying degrees but did not equate to violations of established policy or law,” an executive summary of the report says.
The agency declined to release the full report because it did not lead to any formal punishment.
The complaints included an email from a DPS medic, Nicholas Wingate, to a superior that described “inhumane” treatment of migrants he witnessed while deployed in Eagle Pass, where the state has strung miles of razor wire and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.
The email said troopers had been ordered to push small children and nursing babies back into the Rio Grande and told not to give water to asylum seekers even in extreme heat. The email, first reported by Hearst Newspapers, sparked a national outcry over Abbott’s crackdown, known as Operation Lone Star.
Wingate did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
The inspector general found there was no “formal order” to deny migrants water under “any circumstance,” but rather not to
give them water under “every circumstance” so that troopers were not encouraging migrants to cross the Rio Grande, according to the executive summary. It said migrants were given water in instances when it was needed.
The investigation also found that there was no directive to “push” migrants back into the Rio Grande, as Wingate alleged in his email, but rather troopers were told to “verbally instruct” migrants to go back to Mexico or to a port of entry.
“The term push in this regard was never intended, nor was it widely interpreted to mean troopers should physically force migrants back toward the river,” the executive summary says.
The summary says there were instances where migrants were injured on the state’s razor wire, but investigators found no evidence
that the wire “or any other devised deterrent” was placed “with the intent to harm migrants.”
Wingate’s email detailed an incident in which a migrant with a significant laceration in his left leg told troopers he cut it while trying to free his child from a razor-wire-wrapped barrel “trap” in the Rio Grande.
Phillip Ayala, the agency’s inspector general, told the Public Safety Commission that oversees DPS on Thursday that the findings were the result of three months of investigation, including interviews with 51 individuals and a review of 108 gigabytes of body camera footage, reports, emails, messages and other documents.
“Our work comes under a lot of scrutiny,” Ayala said. “We welcome that scrutiny because
we are able to defend it with facts.”
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat and vocal critic of Operation Lone Star, said he did not trust the findings.
“Individual DPS troopers risked their careers to blow the whistle about the abuses that are part of Operation Lone Star, and their accounts align with what asylum-seekers have also said,” Castro said in a statement. “We have to remember that senior leaders at the Texas DPS lied about Uvalde. Operation Lone Star is a political stunt, and DPS leaders have become little more than spokespeople for Governor Abbott. They’ve lost all credibility, and there is no reason to trust that they can honestly investigate themselves.”
During his testimony before the Public Safety Commission,
Ayala directly refuted details of two specific incidents from the Wingate email.
Wingate wrote about a pregnant woman who was having a miscarriage while found caught in the wire, doubled over in pain.
Ayala said the 19-year-old was found in the wire with abdominal pain, but was not having a miscarriage. She was treated at a medical clinic and released the next day. Ayala said a sonogram taken at the clinic indicated she had a 12-week-old fetus with a healthy heartbeat.
Wingate also wrote about an instance in which a 15-year-old migrant broke his leg while trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father. Wingate wrote that troopers splinted the leg and transferred the child to EMS for further care.
Ayala said the medical report from the facility where he was treated indicated that the boy had broken his leg seven weeks earlier in Colombia.
“The report in the email had some information that wasn’t complete,” Ayala said.
Ayala did not provide any information on the other incidents detailed by Wingate, including the case of the man who allegedly cut his leg trying to free his child from a barrel, or another instance in which a 4-year-old girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through the state-owned wire and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers.
DPS Director Steve Mccraw said he appreciated the “thoroughness” of Ayala’s investigation “and the diligence in terms of no stone going uncovered.
“It was important to have all of the facts in that regard,” Mccraw said.