Texas Border a Lab for What Will Happen to Rest of U.S., Says Eagle Pass Activist

Editor’s note: This article is part of a series on debunking the lies about refugees, migrants and immigrants.

Amerika Garcia Grewal grew up in Eagle Pass, Texas, which is a city of about 30,000 people on the U.S.-Mexico border right across from Piedras Negras, Mexico. She is a founding member of the Border Vigil in Eagle Pass, and she gets emotional recalling how and why the Border Vigil came about.

As part of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star – a joint border militarization effort ofthe Texas Military Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety begun in 2021 – a long row of buoys equipped with razor wire and saw blades had been placed in the Rio Grande River at Eagle Pass to prevent people from swimming across the river there to enter the U.S.

“On Aug. 2, 2023, we got the news that two bodies had been found in the buoys,” Garcia Grewal told the People’s Tribune. “These are buoys that had been installed about two weeks previously, and we had warned that these buoys would lead to deaths….On the border, we have a family oriented, community oriented perspective, and so the instant we got the news, we said we have to have a memorial for these folks. We came together [in Eagle Pass’s Shelby Park] and we had a beautiful service, and we cried our hearts out, and we had Mariachis that played us down to the river where we put flowers on to the Rio Grande. And, you know, everybody hugged and we’re like, tomorrow’s going to be better. That was August 7, 2023. And the very next day, there were more bodies found in the river, people who had drowned in the river.” Out of these events, the Border Vigil, one of the Human Rights programs of the Eagle Pass Border Coalition, became a regular monthly memorial service in Shelby Park.

The Eagle Pass Border Coalition has been protesting militarization of the border and its impact on the local community since 2017. Since drowning, exposure, and deaths due to high speed chases hit record highs in 2022 and 2023, the Border Vigil is also raising awareness of the number of needless deaths in border counties.

The Texas Tribune reported in January that, since 2021, Gov. Abbott “has deployed state troopers across the 1,200 mile Texas-Mexico border; ordered state police to arrest migrants who are suspected of trespassing; spent $11 million to install 70,000 rolls of concertina wire along the Rio Grande; and spent $1.5 billion on about a dozen miles of border walls.” The Tribune reported in July that, “More recently, they [soldiers on the Texas-Mexico border] have turned to crowd control, trying to contain groups of migrants that have pushed through state barriers and shooting pepper balls to discourage crossings. To support the operation, 18 other states have deployed roughly 2,400 troops to the Texas-Mexico border in the last two years,…”

Texas has built an 80-acre military base inside the Eagle Pass city limits. Current capacity is nearly 1000 and final capacity is anticipated to be more than 2,000 National Guard troops. Eagle Pass became one of the focal points of Operation Lone Star, in part because of the large waves of immigrants crossing the border there in the fall of 2023 – as many as 700 a day at times and because, unlike Laredo and Eagle Pass, local government has not protested state overreach.

Garcia Grewal knew in 2023 that people died in the river regularly, but she wanted to get a more comprehensive picture of what was going. She began looking last year for Customs and Border Patrol data on the number of deaths of immigrants along the border, and she found there wasn’t any for 2023 or 2022. Although the agency had detailed data on drugs, weapons and people they intercepted, “they weren’t recording [the deaths] at all,” she said.

“We were never able to find official United States government statistics on how many people died on our southern border in 2023. We used the Washington Office on Latin America. They had a list of 700 known deaths, and then estimated that the actual number was more, at least double, possibly three times the 700,” Garcia Grewal said. Border Vigil members put up a cross memorial to the dead in mid-December in an area of the 47-acre Shelby Park under Bridge One, one of the two international bridges between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras.

Local officials had told them the cross memorial could stay until Jan. 15, 2024. But on Jan. 10, “the governor actually invaded Shelby Park,” said Garcia Grewal. National Guardsmen with large military vehicles occupied the park, and they refused entry to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) members, local citizens, and even the mayor.

“It was about 11 p.m.,” she said, “and we drove down to Shelby Park and sure enough, we have these 18-year-old kids holding guns bigger than they are. And they didn’t point them at us or anything, but they were not letting us through. We had a closing service scheduled with multiple pastors coming from both the United States and outside the United States to remove the memorial. And I said this is our regularly scheduled worship activity. We have a constitutional right to worship freely. You cannot do this to us.”

The CBP was denied use of the park’s boat ramp to enter the river, and Garcia Grewal feared the agency would be unable to reach people in distress in the river quickly enough to save them. On Jan. 12, she said, “We got news that a mother and her two children had drowned and another mother and two children were sent to the hospital with hypothermia.”

Garcia Grewal brought the park closure to the attention of media outlets, and media scrutiny and the threat of lawsuits forced state authorities to give the Border Vigil group access to the park. Today, the military and state police remain in control of the park, granting virtually no access to local people and the media.

“For a solid year, we have met [at the park] on the first Monday of each month, about half an hour before sunset,” said Garcia Grewal. “After the first month we stopped doing the speeches and everything. We’re like, we know what happened, let’s just come together in song. So it’s a brief service.”

And the deaths continue. Today, Garcia Grewal said, “we are at historical lows of people crossing into the United States, but the drowning rate is as high as it’s ever been.” Deterrence policies like Operation Lone Star don’t really stop immigration, she said, they just produce more deaths as people take risks trying to find ways around the barriers. In addition to the drownings, she said, people die trying to cross through the desert, and she said she has heard of people being cut by the concertina wire and bleeding to death. People also die, or suffer terrible injuries, trying to ride “La Bestia” (the beast), a freight train that travels from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border, she said.

Garca Grewal related how a Honduran woman who arrived in the U.S. in the 1970s told her that thousands used to migrate from Central America to the U.S., and thousands would arrive. Today, the woman said, thousands leave Central America, but only hundreds arrive in the U.S.

Garcia Grewal noted that one of the lies the state is telling about Operation Lone Star is that it has reduced the flow of immigrants through Eagle Pass and other border cities. What actually happened, she said, is that in December 2023 U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas went to Mexico City and met with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador about having Mexico act to reduce the flow of immigrants to the U.S. border.

Mike Garcia, Garcia Grewal’s father, makes regular trips across the river into Piedras Negras, Mexico to take donated supplies to immigrant relief agencies there. He said that, after Blinken and Mayorkas met with Mexico’s president, Mexico began “stopping people coming into Mexico from Guatemala. They put troops.” Immigrants already in Mexico are being kept away from the U.S. border by police and the military, and encouraged to remain in Mexico and work. He said he doesn’t know what the U.S. told the Mexican government, but he speculated that President Biden may have threatened to impose tariffs on goods coming into the U.S. from Mexico.

“Operation Lone Star is actually not about immigration,” added Garcia Grewal. She said the program plays to Gov. Abbott’s political base, “but also, by declaring a disaster by implementing Operation Lone Star, he got access to all of Texas’s $30 billion surplus. He’s allocated $11.5 billion already, and it’s funded through 2025. So what we’re watching is the largest theft of Texas public funds ever….We have so many colonias in Eagle Pass, households that do not have running water. We don’t have good internet access throughout Maverick County. We have neighborhoods where the housing has increased dramatically, but the roads have not. So they’ve got horrible traffic jams. Our Texas tax dollars are going to this stupid forward operating base [being built nearby] that is criminal in its very nature, and it’s not going to the very real needs the people of Texas have. We keep telling teachers, I’m sorry, there’s no money for a salary increase. And yet, they know this is a lie because they can see all the brand new vehicles that Operation Lone Star is paying for to law enforcement, and so the very people who are supposed to be enforcing the laws are turning the other way because they get a brand new building, a brand new vehicle.”

Asked what the government should do in terms of a more humane immigration policy, Garcia Grewal said, “Irregular immigration is actually only a tiny percentage of all of the migration that’s happening around the world. The vast majority of people are going from point A to point B completely legally….But we’re having an overreaction to irregular migration that is impacting the rest of the system….If we looked at this and applied a humane, timely, effective system, things like funding DNA swabs so that if somebody does come in who has a criminal record, we can find them….And we’re not saying that we’re not releasing people into the country that are already known to be, you know, quote unquote ‘bad guys.’ But the vast majority of people that I’ve seen when I canoe and kayak the river are families. They are women, they are children, they are family.”

Regarding the border bill that Biden supported and that Kamala Harris has said she will support, Garcia Grewal said, “I have some very real concerns about the border bill. She [Harris] said she intends to continue Biden’s trajectory [about border security], but it’s still better than the alternative [referring to Trump].”

She added: “One of my biggest issues with all of this is that people are literally dying in a river….but we are screaming bloody murder about what’s going on, and it’s not stopping. And, and I believe that the City of Eagle Pass and our sister cities up and down the borderlands are the testing ground for worse things. They’re finding out what outrages people will live with, and then they’re going to apply that in more places. And Trump came to Eagle Pass on February 29, 2024, and he said he liked what he saw, and it was a good start. That’s terrifying to me. People need to pay attention to what’s happening to us here in Eagle Pass, because we have concertina wire, we have tanks on Main Street in Eagle Pass, Texas, and it will happen to the rest of Texas, and to the rest of the United States if we don’t stand up and say, hey, that’s not right.”

She also said that Trump’s Project 2025 “concerns me.” She said the mass deportation of immigrants that Trump envisions would affect her family. And, she added, she is concerned that the “racism coupled with misogyny” that will be directed at Kamala Harris will worsen the divisions in the country.

Garcia Grewal concluded: “I have faith, but I still worry. We are being used as a staging ground. We’re being used as a laboratory for the rest of the United States. And like I said, we’re standing outside of Shelby Park shouting bloody murder, and folks aren’t paying attention. I am just really worried that more will happen before the tide finally turns. I do believe the arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice. I have faith that it will bend towards justice, and I’m hoping that we’re coming to that part of that story in the narrative of the United States.”