A dispatch from Eagle Pass, where the Texas governor has amped up the cruelty toward migrants to boost his political profile.
— The video is 13 seconds long. In the foreground is an orderly green lawn, lit and safe. In the background, there are the lights of Mexico, Coahuila state. In the middle is the river. It’s a void, darker than the night sky.
But Abbott’s fondness for armed men goes beyond that: It seems to fill something in him that he lacks. Last year, after he suffered one humiliating setback in front of the legislature, he summoned the press to an airfield north of Austin, the state capital. He held a press conference at which he took no questions, and announced that he was sending more soldiers to the border.
They look bored. These are weekend soldiers, National Guard. When Abbott first called them down here, in 2021, there was a, as men and women discovered they would be postponing jobs and weddings to come to the river and do nothing much at all. Abbott said very little about that, but he has tried to make a better show of caring about them.
It was a very effective show, and it played on Fox News for days. The whispering about Abbott as a potential Trump ticketmate — or at least a cabinet secretary — picked up. Nevárez is a one-of-a-kind Texas character who harbors the sneaking suspicion that many Texans don’t think he’s one of them, in the same way they may not think of Eagle Pass as Texas. He grew up here and in Piedras Negras, across the Mexican border, and travels between the two constantly, like many who live here. The towns have two names but function as one city. His law practice is in Eagle Pass. He records music in a studio across the river.
What drives Abbott, I ask? I’ve been writing about him for ten years, and I still can’t detect much in him other than an insensitivity to other people’s suffering and an unfocused ambition that comes out mostly as a desire to see other powerful men bend the knee. Maybe that’s all there is, says Nevárez. He notes that Abbott has always been “very well protected” politically. “He basically was protected into the governorship,” Nevárez says. “They ran off other would-be challengers.
There’s confusion in Eagle Pass, too. There have been times in the past few years where migrants and asylum-seekers seemed to overrun the city, and the situation was clearly untenable. But in general, crossings aren’t as numerous here as they are in far south Texas or the California and Arizona borders. The periodic crises and the often oppressive presence of security forces here has created a kind of “psychosis,” Nevárez says. Residents get frustrated.
There were many others. Months before, a 12-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy came across. They had the phone number of relatives in Florida written on their arms. Nevárez says he got them happy meals and put them on the phone with family members, with whom they had been out of touch for days. He gets quiet, and has to collect himself. “The sound of their voices on the other line,” he says, he’ll never forget. “I didn’t want to cry in front of them.
When Abbott sent state police to the border, he sent personnel who had not been trained to do their jobs in the same way. And he asked them to do more grisly and demoralizing work, by taking steps to make the river more lethal. There was the initial wave of suicides.
The whole political apparatus of Texas is out to get migrants — and anyone who may feel empathy for them. And it may all be prologue. The Trump campaign’s plan for immigration in his second term is toOne afternoon, I cross to Piedras Negras. There’s a shelter for migrants here run by a Catholic order that tries to patch up the weary before they make the final jump.
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