The humanitarian crisis at the U.S./Mexico border has reached a new level of dire. According to emails sent by a state employee to reporters at the Houston Chronicle, Texas state troopers had been ordered to push migrant children back into the Rio Grande in order to deter them from attempting to cross the border.
Nicholas Wingate, a trooper-medic stationed at the border described the conditions there as “inhumane,” with multiple reports of migrants drowning, collapsing due to heat exhaustion, or suffering grievous injury after being entangled in barbed wire.
According to Wingate, Texas troopers are using submerged barrels coated in razor wire in areas with “high water and low visibility” in order to halt the progress of migrants. Additionally, he claims that officials told troopers to deny immigrants and refugees water as temperatures in the area regularly climb to over 100 degrees.
Wingate cites a specific instance where troopers treated a four-year-old girl who collapsed from exhaustion after she attempted to pass through razor wire. The national guard soldiers then physically pushed her and her group back toward Mexico. In the same day, troopers found a 19-year-old pregnant woman in agony after she became entangled in the razor wire and miscarried. Another migrant child broke his leg while attempting to navigate around the barrels and had to be carried by his father.
In a separate case, troopers found a group of over 120 migrants attempting to cross the Rio Grande. The group included small children and infants who were still nursing, all of whom were exhausted and starving. Wingate alleges that a commanding officer at the scene ordered troopers to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico”.
Wingate’s email detailed additional drownings that were not reported. On July 1st, federal border agents allegedly watched and did nothing while a mother and her two children drowned in the river. The corpses of the mother and one of her children were found and pronounced dead. The second child’s body has yet to be recovered.
Many troopers reportedly refused the orders of their commanding officers due to the “very real potential of exhausted people drowning,” wrote Wingate. The troopers were allegedly told to “tell [the migrants] to go to Mexico and get into our vehicle and leave” by their commanders.
While some troopers carried out their superiors’ orders without question, many were not able to reconcile with what they were being commanded to do. According to the Texas Tribune, a twenty-year-old trooper used his service weapon in order to take his own life while working on Operation Lone Star, the mission organized by Texas Governor Greg Abbott to address the situation at the border. If officially ruled a suicide, the trooper’s death will mark the fifth suicide suspected to be linked to the mission.
U.S. politicians from both sides of the aisle were swift to condemn the situation at the border. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre labeled the actions taken in Operation Lone Star as “abhorrent” and “dangerous,” in a statement made to reporters from the Associated Press. “We are talking about the bedrock values of who we are as a country and the human indecency that we are seeing,” said Jean-Pierre said. “If this is true, it is just completely, completely wrong.” While Texas state Democrats announced plans to investigate the conditions at the border, Republican congressman Tony Gonzales tweeted that “border security should not equal a lack of humanity.”
The Mexican government filed a diplomatic complaint over the floating razor wire barriers. Alicia Bárcena—Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs—told reporters that Texas’ use of buoys to deter migrants from crossing the Rio Grande is a violation of water treaties between the U.S. and Mexico. Bárcena intends to deploy an inspection team to the Rio Grande to determine if the barrier extends into the Mexican side of the border and hinders the natural water flow in violation of the treaty. Abott’s office has yet to comment on the complaint. “We’re securing the border at the border,” Abbott said in June when he announced the use of the buoys. “What these buoys will allow us to do is prevent people from getting to the border.”
And that’s exactly what they’re doing, but at what cost?
(featured image: John Moore/Getty Images)
