Texas Scorecard by Sydnie Henry | July 21, 2022
“The destruction and the fear, it’s 24/7. We never get a break.”On 1,300 square miles of rough, rugged wilderness dotted with scrub brush and baked brown by the South Texas heat, Kinney County is a hotspot for smugglers and traffickers—and reveals just a glimpse of the shocking humanitarian crisis at the U.S. southern border.
Illegal border crossers trekking through Kinney County are not of the “women and children searching for a better life” variety, but are instead coyotes herding groups of men and occasionally women and children in vehicles or on foot past patrol checkpoints and through local ranches.
John and Donna Schuster, longtime Kinney County residents, live 25 miles from the Rio Grande River. Donna, a second-generation rancher, previously told Texas Scorecard the out-of-control southern border has turned their life “completely upside down.”
“You don’t leave the house before daylight, and you’ve got to be home before dark, and you keep your blinds closed,” John explained. Additionally, doors are stoppered and pistols don’t leave your hip, even once inside.
“The destruction and the fear, it’s 24/7. We never get a break. You know, like a police officer goes to work, works his 12-hour shift, then he goes home. We’re on standby, on guard 24/7 just to protect ourselves.”
Government ActionNow, Operation Lone Star—the Texas government’s current border security program—has Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers traversing Kinney County and tracking illegal border crossers with game cameras installed on private ranches. Donna said, “[DPS] is telling me that they’re catching them before they ever get to us. That’s why we’re not seeing the foot traffic that we were seeing.”
However, despite the lessened foot traffic at the moment, two bailouts (where coyotes abandon vehicles in a chase and escape) occurred on the Schusters’ property just in the past couple of weeks. Both times John says the coyotes escaped and left behind only women, children, and stolen vehicles. Local Border Patrol agents, Texas DPS troopers, and the Kinney County sheriff and his deputies are struggling to respond to all of the property owners’ calls as well as the large groups crossing at neighboring Del Rio and Eagle Pass.
On top of that, the treks through the rough lands in the extreme Texas summer weather are especially perilous—and even deadly. In Kinney County, six or seven illegal border crossers have died from heat exhaustion this year, and John said that in Del Rio, “they’re finding one dead body a day due to heat exhaustion somewhere, or a drowning.”
More:
https://texasscorecard.com/state/the-reality-of-life-on-the-southern-border/
