MCALLEN, Texas — Migrant smugglers transporting people who have just made it across the Texas-Mexico border are increasingly leading Border Patrol on pursuits through nearby school zones as a way of getting law enforcement officers to stop their chase.
Smugglers in the United States who move both people and drugs on the northern shore of the Rio Grande River are increasingly failing to yield when Border Patrol agents attempt to pull them over, a senior Border Patrol agent based in the Rio Grande Valley told reporters and members of Congress during a tour Tuesday evening.
“They’re not wanting to stop,” the official said. “If they approach a school zone, we terminate our pursuit. … We’re just not going to put the public at risk, so they do it on purpose. Now they’re exploiting, you know, now they do it during school time. They do it at 7 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. when it’s school drop-off time. They do it at 3:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. when it’s pick-up time.”
“Life, it’s not precious to them, right? And they know it’s precious to us,” said the agent, who, before joining the Border Patrol in 2004, was a middle school science teacher. The official requested anonymity to discuss what the Border Patrol told members of Congress.
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Smugglers driving the transport vehicles act so quickly, the agent said, that they get from the overgrown brush near the river to the road “within seconds.”
“They’re going to be on pavement hauling butt out of here, and we’re gonna have to be chasing them,” the official said.
This region of the 2,000-mile southern border is one of nine regions, but over the past decade, agents here have encountered more illegal crossers than any other place. The Rio Grande River sector stretches along the 320 miles of weaving river and up 250 miles of Gulf Coast. The river portion had an existing 55 miles of border wall before President Donald Trump took office and was slated to receive another 110 miles, but because President Joe Biden suspended construction in January, only 21 miles were completed.
The existing wall system, which includes cameras, fiber optic underground movement detectors, lighting, and all-weather roads, is helping agents get a head start responding to smuggling incidents before they lead to vehicle chases, but far more wall is necessary to stop them altogether, according to the Border Patrol official.
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“Even if buys us five minutes, we’ll take it,” the official said. “If I’m going to assign 10 agents to this 1-mile stretch that doesn’t have any infrastructure in it, if I add the infrastructure, now I only have to assign one agent. So it is a force multiplier because if I don’t have any infrastructure to slow him down, then I’m going to have to have a lot of agents. They’re sitting there right in their vehicles patrolling. … It slows them down and buys us time.”
