The Border Crisis Comes to a Once-Quiet part of West Texas

OJINAGA, Mexico — Under the international bridge connecting this town to Presidio, Texas, a human smuggling guide snorted cocaine with a buddy and two prostitutes — the chosen fruits from leading a large group of Central American immigrants on a long backpacking journey to new American lives.

“Jose Antonio”, the name offered to the Center for Immigration Studies, said he was a long-distance foot guide, a guia, for the ultra-violent La Linea cartelcontrolling this area. He leads groups of immigrants on eight- to 12-day treks through the remote desert terrain in West Texas with a singular goal: get them to U.S. Interstate 10, where associates pick them up at landmarks and drive them into the nation’s interior.

By cell phone, Antonio ordered the chunk of plastic-wrapped cocaine and paid the delivery man from a fist-sized wad of 200- and 500-peso bills pulled from the front pocket of his jeans. He chopped up the small white block with a knife on the tailgate of his beat-up old Chevy pickup truck — a brand new truck was on order with all his new money, he said.

Over the course of an hour or so, Antonio explained the business, attributing his windfall to what he termed la invitación, the invitation. This is the local cartel reference to presidential candidate Joe Biden’s promises to the world’s poor that if they crossed the border illegally when he became president they would be welcome to stay, never fear deportation, and maybe get citizenship. Antonio said that when Biden actually won, business in Mexico’s Chihuahua State instantly boomed ¡como nunca! Like never before.
“They come in from all over Central America, Haiti, Africa, Indonesia, and from all over South America,” Antonio explained between snorts from a flattened 16-penny nail, smiling at his new good fortune. “They just keep coming and keep coming and keep coming.”

For the first time in local memories, rising streams of large groups — 50-to-100 illegal immigrants each — are constantly flowing through the normally quiet Big Bend Sector, one of the biggest, most remote, and perhaps out-of-mind of the eight designated CBP operating areas along the southern border. With 165,154 square miles and 571 miles of Rio Grande border in West Texas, Big Bend also is historically the least trammeled by illegal immigrants, perhaps because of its deterring harshness.

Not anymore, though.

Eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer rigs and trucks of all sizes now pull right up to the river in unending succession to unload people and drug cargo in broad daylight along the long empty stretches of riverside territory. Police chases of immigrant transport vehicles are now commonplace in towns further inland for the first time. And Border Patrol agents, largely unreinforced despite new circumstances, are chasing groups through the desert day and night, losing most and strained beyond capacity to impact what’s happening, they say.

“It’s never been this busy,” one agent who has worked in the Van Horn Station Area for more than a decade told CIS. “I’ve never seen 18-wheelers out on the levy on the Mexican side like this, filled with God-only-knows what. It was predicted before the new administration came in, and it happened. Now the cartels are having a field day.”
In one recent notable incident, five vehicles blasted in from the Mexican side not far south of Sierra Blanca, filled with marijuana, meth — and 87 immigrants. Border Patrol caught that convoy.

But much more often, Border Patrol only ever learns about these events from tracks that churn the dirt, video recordings from hidden cameras, and distant dust plumes. Inland, sheriff’s deputies and Texas DPS Highway Patrol routinely engage in high-speed vehicle chases of smuggler vehicles that pick up migrants off the interstate and state roads leading to it.

More often than not, the passengers and drivers bail out and run into the desert, never to be seen again. The most recent of three crazy smuggler vehicle chases through Marfa and Fort Davis, where Presidio County Sheriff Danny Dominguez was in the lead vehicle, ended in the backyard of Dominguez’s own house. The driver ran and got away.