Texas Observer by Kate Groetzinger 1/24/2019
Despite Trump’s attempt to paint the Texas-Mexico border as a war zone, border counties are safer than the president’s own backyard. And local lawmen don’t believe a wall will do any good.President Trump visited McAllen earlier this month to drum up support for spending $5.7 billion to build more border wall segments on the U.S.-Mexico border. He staged a press conference surrounded by piles of confiscated drugs, guns and cash, describing the situation at the border as “a national emergency.†With the government partially shut down over Trump’s funding dispute with Congress, the president is trying to prove that there’s a new, growing “crisis†on the border to pressure Democrats to cave. But law enforcement leaders in at least two border counties, including the sheriff who patrols McAllen, say the picture Trump is painting of the Texas borderlands is inaccurate.
Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. “Eddie†Guerra, who is in charge of policing the largest and most populous county in the Rio Grande Valley, said that crime rates in his county are at record lows, and that illegal immigration has very little effect on the safety of residents. Meanwhile, Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson, who is responsible for policing the largest county in Texas, said he doesn’t support the construction of a wall along any part of the 192-mile stretch of border in Brewster County, which includes Big Bend National Park.
“Because we’re on the border, the perception is that there’s murders every day and there’s shootings every day. Yet here in our county, we don’t have that going on. It’s very, very safe,†Guerra told the Observer.
But don’t take the sheriffs’ word for it. In 2017 (the latest year for which data is available), there were 4.4 murders per 100,000 people in Hidalgo County — about half the rate of other metro areas in Texas and a quarter of the murder rate in Washington, D.C. It’s also lower than the 6.3 murders per 100,000 people in 2017 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located.
In addition to fewer murders, the violent crime and property crime rates in Hidalgo County are less than half of what they were in 1999. Guerra, a Democrat who has lived in the RGV his entire life, said the majority of immigrants entering the county without papers are Central American asylum-seekers fleeing violence and poverty who turn themselves over to Border Patrol agents as soon as they can.
“They’re averaging, here in the Rio Grande Valley sector, about 600 apprehensions a day. Most are family units. These family units and unaccompanied children pose exactly zero security threat in the county,†Guerra said.
Guerra’s observations are reflected in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data: Since September, families and unaccompanied children have made up more than half of Border Patrol apprehensions. And apprehensions across the entire U.S.-Mexico border are down significantly over the last 20 years, with the number of migrants apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley falling by 44 percent from 1997 to 2017.
More:
https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-border-sheriffs-there-is-no-crisis-and-we-dont-want-trumps-wall/