The US town living under the shadow of a silent invasion

More than 11.2 million people, almost the equivalent of the population of Bolivia, have crossed the US border without documentation in the three years since Joe Biden became President, an extraordinary human tidal wave that has triggered a constitutional crisis and left Americans angry, worried and willing to embrace extreme countermeasures.

While the media and political class have fixated on Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan, ordinary Americans have remained more concerned about illegal immigration, which overtook inflation and the economy as voters’ No.1 concern in February.

The surge in arrivals, more than 3 per cent of the US population, has fuelled fears of a crime wave after a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who crossed the border illegally in 2022 was charged with murdering 22-year-old University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley in February.

It also even has fed fears of a fifth column. The number of Chinese nationals, almost exclusively young men, crossing the southern border illegally has reached 27,500 since October 1 last year, up almost 8000 per cent since 2021.

A young Turkish immigrant, stopped by media at the border, said Americans were right to worry about the motivations of individuals, who typically paid many thousands of dollars to criminal cartel members.

“American people (are) right (to worry) who comes into this country. They don’t know. OK, I’m good. But (what if) they’re not good? How if they’re killers, psychopaths? No guarantee of that,” he told Fox News in San Diego County last week.

Last year US law enforcement seized more than 27,000 pounds (more than 12.2 tonnes) of the deadly synthetic drug fentanyl, up almost 500 per cent from 2020 – enough to kill the entire population of the US.

The influx has strained resources across the nation, pushing up hotel prices as state governments and cities scramble to house thousands of immigrants after furious Republican governors started bussing them to Chicago, New York, Washington and other big Democrat-run cities.

For the first time, the average price of a hotel room in New York City, which is expecting to spend $US10bn ($15bn) across three years paying hotels to house about 65,000 migrants, shot above $US300 last year. Of the 135 hotels used for migrant shelters, out of a total of 680 hotels in the city, none has been converted back for use as tourist lodgings.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has promised a sweeping deportation of illegal immigrants if he wins in November, a policy embraced by more than half of Americans (including 42 per cent of Democrats), according to an Axios poll conducted in April.

“Many of those people are coming from prisons, many of those people frankly are murderers, and they’re drug dealers, and they’re coming from mental institutions,” the former president told an audience of Libertarians last weekend, suggesting he would expel at least 15 million immigrants with the help of local police.

In recent months President Joe Biden, who immediately relaxed several Trump immigration orders that had discouraged would-be arrivals, has tried to blame Republicans for the surge because they refuse, at Trump’s insistence, to legislate a new, supposedly tougher, immigration law.

“We gave Republicans a second chance to show where they stand,” Democrat Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said last week, referring to a proposed law some Republicans had earlier expressed interest in supporting but that failed to pass the Senate a second time.

Of the 9.6 million immigrants who have been apprehended by law enforcement authorities trying to enter the US since January 2021, when Biden became president, almost 7.9 million crossed the southern border with Mexico.

Few border towns have borne the brunt of the influx as much as Eagle Pass, Texas, whose proximity to a relatively shallow part of the Rio Grande made it the epicentre for border crossings over the northern winter months, when thousands of immigrants were streaming across the river every day.

About 3½ hours drive from the state capital, Austin, Eagle Pass, a town of about 30,000 people, became a national flashpoint in February after a furious Texas government sent thousands of National Guard members and state troopers to secure the river, setting up a confrontation – and potential constitutional crisis – with the federal government’s Customs and Border Protection agents.

Republican Governor Greg Abbott banned federal government employees from a 2½-mile stretch of the river on either side of the town, including Shelby Park, 19ha of fields along the river, installing giant shipping containers and barbed wire to make entering the US almost impossible.

The number of arrivals has dropped markedly since – down more than 50 per cent in April around Eagle Pass to 10,300 compared with the same month last year – suggesting the tough measures have worked for now.

But the town still lives under the shadow of a silent invasion.

“Last week we caught 23 immigrants in a house; the smugglers knew it was empty,” says Maverick County sheriff Tom Schmerber, fresh from winning a fourth four-year term and whose face is plastered on billboards throughout Eagle Pass.

A local Pizza Hut waiter, who doesn’t want to be named, tells me his girlfriend came upon two illegal immigrants hiding in a garbage bin.

Eagle Pass is swarming with police, state troopers and National Guard members from numerous Republican states that have joined forces across the Mexican border to staunch a flow they argue the Biden administration cannot or will not stem. Every car leaving the town on the one road to San Antonio, three hours away, is checked.

“These are some of the worst of the worst folks,” says Robert Danley, the chief patrol agent for US Customs and Border Protection for the Del Rio sector, which includes Eagle Pass.

Danley and colleagues unveiled photographs of eight potentially violent criminals at an event on the outskirts of Eagle Pass early last month, part of a joint effort with the Mexican government dubbed Se Busca Informacion to encourage locals to help authorities find hardened criminals.

The human traffic is a multimillion-dollar business for the Mexican transnational cartels, which determine who can cross.

“It’s about $US22m a week that the cartels and smuggling organisations are making here, which obviously brings a tremendous amount of resources so they can fight against us,” Danley says. Those who try to cross without paying up to $US10,000 a person are often killed by the gangs.

Sergeant Eric Allen of the Texas National Guard, who escorts me along the river when Inquirer visits last month, says two of his colleagues recently were imprisoned in US jail after authorities caught them turning a blind eye to crossings for a few thousand dollars each. They had been “honey-potted” by Mexican women working for the cartels.

“When the girls ask you on dating apps more about your job than your hobbies, you know it could be a problem,” Allen tells Inquirer.

Local authorities aren’t so sure the drop in crossings is entirely owing to Texas or US policy, for all the relentless media attention and political partisanship.

“They’re going to do it; you build a 10-foot wall and they’re just going to build an 11-foot ladder; or they can literally walk to the end of the wall and go around it,” Eagle Pass police officer Humberto Garza says.

Veteran Val Verde County sheriff Joe Martinez reckons all the wire and containers can’t explain it. “I think that this administration, the Biden administration, and the Mexican administration got together,” he tells Inquirer. “Something’s happening behind the scenes to explain this.”

Indeed, in late April Biden and his Mexican counterpart, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, had a rare phone conversation.

“The two leaders ordered their national security teams to work together to immediately implement concrete measures to significantly reduce irregular border crossings while protecting human rights,” the White House said.

“I’m pretty sure all the big companies in Mexico started going up complaining to their government,” says Schmerber, the Maverick County sheriff, suggesting the closure of the bridges over the river joining Eagle Pass and the much larger Piedras Negras on the other side by US authorities in response to the winter surge had hit Mexican businesses.

Local emergency services chief Jesus Rodriguez agrees. “My understanding is that Mexico has been more proactive in trying to curtail people coming through,” he tells me.

Less remarked than the surge or the sudden drop in illegal migrant numbers around Eagle Pass – the same can’t be said for California, where numbers have soared – are the benefits the crisis has delivered to the local community.

Nightly hotel rates exceeded $US400 a night earlier this year, when the international media descended at the peak of the surge.

Eagle Pass Chamber of Commerce chief executive Jorge Barrera says the closure of car and pedestrian bridges over the river to Mexico, which occurred during the height of the influx, frustrated locals and damaged business.

“But now more restaurants, hotels are coming in, we hear a lot of people wanting to move here, there’s more retail, Eagle Pass is becoming like a hub,” he tells Inquirer, rattling off the names of new businesses that have emerged.

“I’m in the perfect place to see it because I can see the meters,” he adds, referring to his full-time job as head of the local water utility.

It’s not only new businesses. The state government is building a huge facility nearby to house up to 1800 National Guard members permanently.

“Local people here started making apartments, too, because we had all the troopers and guardsmen here, so yes, it’s been great for the economy,” Schmerber says. “Remember the immigrants don’t really want to be here, they want to head up north.”

Local police officer Garza tells me his force lost three officers recently, explaining how the crisis has injected extra money into the community.

“Any local entity like a city or a county cannot compete with what the state offers; these guys are making, you know, with all their overtime, in the six figures,” he says.

That’s a sum of money that goes a long way in Eagle Pass, where tacos are available in restaurants for less than $US2 – perhaps a fifth of what the same item would cost in Washington DC.

The decline in migrant numbers around Eagle Pass could be a calm before the storm.

“I heard rumours that some of the countries down there (in South America) were releasing their prisoners and encouraging them to come up here,” says Garza, echoing claims Trump has made in recent weeks that Inquirer can’t substantiate.

Val Verde County sheriff Martinez fears a “rush to the border nearer to November” if it looks as if Trump could win.

The issue remains as politically divisive as ever. Would-be Republican congressman Jay Furman, who won preselection for Texas congressional district 28 last week, says the US should learn from Australia’s response to illegal immigration.

“I always draw people’s attention back to how you used to deal with this, correctly, you deported them to your own prison island,” he tells Inquirer.

Furman is part of a new breed of Republicans who trenchantly disavow the old GOP attitude to relatively free immigration over the southern border, which was praised as a source of cheap labour and economic growth.

“One side is corrupted by a desire for ‘voter replacement’, and the other side is toeing the line for the Fortune 500 and chamber of commerce, wanting lower wages,” Furman says.

The Biden administration’s tolerance for such a huge and unpopular spike in illegal immigration is puzzling. It has the same tools available as the previous administration.

Schmerber sees some merit in the “voter replacement” arguments – a popular conspiracy theory that says Democrats welcome such large numbers of migrants in the hope they will vote Democrat one day.

Or perhaps the two parties have simply switched roles.

“The economy of the United States would end in three days,” Democrat congressman Eric Sorensen has said, making arguments once more typically made by Republicans, who argued the economic benefits of cheap labour for US farms, households and small businesses.

What’s clear is it’s not the border towns that are suffering so much from the so-called border crisis but, rather, Americans in the rest of the country who are competing for jobs or enduring a spike in crime.

“After the immigrants are here for six, eight months they find out they need to do something to make money, and if they don’t have skills the only options are burglarising or drug,” Schmerber says.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-texas-town-living-under-the-shadow-of-a-silent-invasion/news-story/ef08cf2413aa5ec69569ff64865c2459

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