Vultures Over Eagle Pass
EAGLE PASS, Texas — A fresh-faced sergeant in U.S. camouflage stopped me at a gate flanked by razor-wire coils and armored Humvees. His "sir," tightly polite, was by the book. The message behind it was clear: "Beat it! I'm here to save the world."
I've seen that from Somalia to Afghanistan and parts in between. But never in America. A phony "border emergency" is savaging the Constitution, while making that world far more dangerous. That feeds deepening hatred abroad for a once-admired nation.
Donald Trump's dehumanizing, simplistic lies are starkly plain in this bilingual town of 28,000. Before a crush at the border in 2021 when his first term ended, people lived in relaxed symbiosis with Piedras Negras just across the Rio Grande.
That barred gate led into Shelby Park, 80 acres by the International Bridge where townsfolk used to gather for July 4 fireworks, concerts, family celebrations and kayaking on the river. The park is now a walled camp for idle photo-op troops.
Trump ordered a crackdown, then sealed the border under Title 42 of the federal public health code during the Covid-19 pandemic. Joe Biden's more humane policies unleashed a backed-up crush on the southern frontier from Tijuana to East Texas.
The human tide had ebbed to a trickle by the end of 2024. Yet Republican propagandists bang away at "Biden's Border Crisis." Greg Abbott, governor of a once-tolerant Texas, leads a jihad against impoverished migrants and families fleeing for their lives.
Rather than reopen Shelby Park, Abbott has fortified it as the base of his $11 billion Operation Lone Star, capable of housing 1,800 well-fed National Guardsmen. Billions more pay for private security forces, detention centers, floating pontoons and makeshift obstacles.
Texas taxpayers have sent at least 100,000 destitute, exhausted people as political pawns to New York, Chicago and other "blue" parts of America. Abbott's buses dumped one group off at Kamala Harris's vice-presidential residence in Washington.
Now Abbott wants federal funds to repay the costs of stopping a bogus invasion of people Trump slanders as vicious criminals and mental deviants.
Before heading to Eagle Pass, I asked long-time colleagues for trustworthy sources. They directed me to Amerika Garcia Grewal, at 48 an activist-researcher with a gift for fitting disparate detail into context.
"This is not about immigration," she told me. "It is the biggest heist the United States has ever seen." Hardline Republicans have figured out how to monetize misery and poverty, she said. "The United States is using the Texas model and expanding it."
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A hard look at the southern border reveals why Trump's "emergency" cynically exploits a century of evolving polices — some wise, some not. The crisis is global. And the United States, most able to alleviate it, does the most to make it worse.
Trump wants to charge $5 million to speed up U.S. residency papers. There are shortcuts for people who qualify. Otherwise, waiting in line can take forever. Undocumented arrivals risk long-term detention in privately run prisons.
As Amerika rattled off hard facts, Mike Garcia listened with a smile at his erudite daughter. He defies every stereotype on a border that confounds those who simplify its realities from a distance.
Mike joked that his face is brown enough for vigilantes to want him shackled and sent to Guantanamo. But he was born in Michigan; his siblings are lighter shades of pale. He named Amerika after his family's new home, with a "k" that reflects his Slovakian forebears' native tongue.
He chuckled when I told him Tucson had bulldozed the downtown barrios I'd known as a kid. "They call that urban renewal," he said. "I call it Mexican removal."
We agreed the old Bracero Program was effective. Mexicans did seasonal work, paid taxes, and went home until they were needed again. "The government saw that worked pretty well," he said with a laugh, "so somebody said, 'Good, let's try something else.'"
In fact, opposition by Cesar Chavez's farmworkers union stopped it in 1964. Something similar would work today. The economy needs four million migrants a year, skilled or not, to thrive. Agriculture, construction, health care, manufacturing and domestic services are stretched to breaking points.
Then, after agreeing on so much, Mike told me why he voted Trump.
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No half-awake citizen needs a rundown of how a dictatorial wrecking crew is dismantling America. This is no longer about Republicans and Democrats but rather simple decency. Democracy has no chance without it.
Yet Mike, decidedly decent, has seen people from everywhere wade across the Rio Grande. Blaming Biden's supposed "open borders," he wants them shut with militarized barriers that also shut Americans off from a rich culture just across a narrow river.
That reflects what divides the nation today. With confusing sources and much else to worry about, people focus on effect without considering cause. Sensible policies and quotas would allow orderly immigration. Instead, those repeated big lies prevail.
Mike's analysis, focused narrowly on the border, left out Trump's depredations abroad, which led to wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. He slashed foreign aid, increasing the need for people to uproot and suffer the pain of finding sanctuary somewhere.
Refugees are different from "economic migrants." Geneva accords drafted after World War II require a fair hearing for asylum seekers who fear for their lives. Today, with climate collapse, poverty, conflict and corruption, it is hard to determine who is which.
In 2023, the United Nations estimated 110 million people were on the move. The number is higher today and growing fast. No walls or coast guards can stop them. If rebuffed by rich nations, they become increasingly desperate.
The European Union's 27 member states border on open waters or land routes from the east. The United States only needs to increase electronic and human surveillance of one border while adding more capacity to vet and process quickly far more immigrants.
But that requires political will and good faith.
Kamala Harris was not a "border czar." Her job was to pressure Central American leaders, among others, to curb violence and corruption that forced people to emigrate. She helped USAID target projects that enabled farmers and poor families to stay put.
Trump's approach is to stop foreign aid and diplomacy. Most people, by far, prefer to remain home among family and familiar culture. They leave when they must. If America rejects them, the weak struggle to survive. The strong find ways to get even.
Rich people buy their way in. Criminals and potential terrorists use false papers, remote airstrips, fast boats or concealed tunnels. U.S. citizens smuggle most fentanyl through official ports of entry. Few desert crossers can carry enough water, let alone drugs.
The border has not been "open" since the U.S. Border Patrol was set up in 1924. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama each deported more undocumented migrants than Trump. Some measures were harsh, but none approached his cruelty.
He separated children, even toddlers, from parents. An estimated 1,400 of them are still missing. Aides blocked his plans to repel migrants by shooting them in the legs and digging alligator-infested moats.
Judges blocked his attempts to keep out Mexicans he termed rapists and murders along with travelers from Muslim countries. When Biden took over, asylum seekers swamped magistrates. Holding facilities for migrants awaiting deportation were soon overrun.
After the initial spike, online applications sharply reduced the numbers. Trump blocked a bipartisan accord in Congress to add border guards and facilities, skewed toward Republican demands. He wanted to campaign on a crisis he could blame on Biden.
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Soon after I left Eagle Pass, JD Vance blew in, fresh from his monstrous treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard in tow. They briefed handpicked reporters who came with them.
With his forked silver tongue, the vice president declared total victory over an invasion of America. Trump would finish the wall. Hegseth repeated earlier promises to deploy combat-hardened U.S. troops at bases along the 1,954-mile border.
News stories quoted a chosen few who heaped praise on Trump for reversing an existential threat by fiat as soon as he reached the Oval Office. But one reporter asked Vance why those pledged mass deportations were still only a trickle.
"Rome wasn't built in a day," he replied. True enough, but when the Roman republic ended up in the hands of a delusional emperor, it collapsed fast.
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Since 2022, the Texas Tribune, the Texas Observer, ProPublica, among others, have revealed distortions and inflated numbers in Operation Lone Star reports. They also describe vigilante assaults and involvement of private companies.
Last month, three border-savvy New York Times reporters probed Trump's delusional "emergency," from southeast Texas to Tijuana.
Sean McGoffin, chief Border Patrol agent in Tucson, described the lowest influx in memory. Asylum seekers, fearful of harsh punishment, no longer surrender en masse. Only the most desperate crossers brave hostile terrain.
"Many migrants who try to navigate the vast unmarked deserts...end up getting lost and dying of heat exhaustion, dehydration or exposure, or are rescued by Border Patrol agents," their report said. Soon, temperatures will soar above 100 degrees.
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In the end, this is about politics. Anyone who believes America is "full" has not been to Texas. The 100-mile road off I-10 to Eagle Pass passes enough open range and farmland to employ legions of people used to hard work. It is a dot on a big country's map.
"Migrants" was once all but synonymous with Mexicans. "Operation Wetback," Dwight Eisenhower's short-lived campaign, which Trump loves to tout, targeted Rio Grande crossers not covered by the Bracero Program.
"Wets" is still a derisive term for crossers in the bone-dry Arizona desert. But today migrants and refugees might be anyone from anywhere: scientists, doctors, educators, entrepreneurs able to employ Americans by the thousands.
One past arrival, for instance, was Ilhan Omar, who fled Somalia to end up in Congress, a whip-smart voice of lived experience among so many legislators with only comic-book knowledge of a complex world.
Today's "mainstream media" and its innumerable tributaries mislead more than inform. Yet reality is clear to anyone who tunes out the tower of babble, listens for that ring of truth and then puts it into broader context with sources they learn to trust.
If you are new to the Mort Report, it aims to help readers do that. I spent 39 years as an Associated Press correspondent and two more as top editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. Now I am "independent," free to say things I see for myself firsthand.
These dispatches, neither newsletters nor blog posts, are meant as mosaic pieces that add up to a portrait of an imperiled planet. Rather than thrust a microphone at random passersby, reporters need to find voices that encapsulate complexity.
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My last stop in Eagle Pass was the Maverick County Democratic Committee office on Main Street, a jumble of posters, files and assorted oddments, including balls of yarn Juanita Martinez and her volunteers knit into stuff to sell for party funds.
Juanita had been described as a firecracker. That fell far short.
Recently, Abbott brought 14 governors to town to boast about his success. He told them, "I think the local residents are angry and rightfully so — because their neighborhoods, their golf courses, their shopping areas all have been invaded.”
Juanita's retort was closer to what I found.
“That’s not true at all,” she told reporters. "We’re being invaded by the crazy people that he has incited to come here and to wreak havoc on our community. We need our park back. I want Governor Greg Abbott to get the hell out of our community.”
I dropped in for a brief interview. We spent the afternoon cruising town. From a hilltop, we saw Shelby Park empty but for bored troops burning through government coffers.
Our last stop was near eddying water at the International Bridge, where Juanita once happened upon a microcosm of the big picture. Her mood shifted from easy laughter to somber.
"When you see a drowned father still clutching his young daughter," she told me, "it changes you. Forever. And we keep at it, doing what we can."
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