On the banks of the Rio Grande, Major Mike Perry of the Texas National Guard pointed up at the new fortifications he and his soldiers had built to stop migrants breaching this part of the US-Mexico border: shining coils of knife-sharp wire bolted to the tops of shipping containers arranged into a line, snaking along the grey churn of the river by a public park.
“You’re looking at four strands of razor wire,” said Perry, a Georgia native with a deep bass voice and a “carnivore only” diet. “With the way we’ve fortified the park, you’re not going to be able to cross here. The first thing you want people to see and understand is: don’t cross here, go to a point of entry.”
Last month Perry and his men seized control of this 2½-mile stretch of the border on the orders of Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, pushing out the federal US border force officers who had been patrolling the area.
The reason, Abbott said, was clear: the border was in chaos, and federal forces were not doing enough to stop record numbers of migrants and asylum seekers crossing the river from Mexico.
This winter, hundreds of thousands of people have crossed the border, by foot in the shallows, swimming through the currents, on rubber rings or on homemade rafts made of polystyrene foam coolers. In December, nearly a quarter of a million were arrested after crossing illegally, up nearly a third on the previous month. They come from across the world — China, Russia, Afghanistan and Lebanon — though most are from south and central America, particularly Venezuela, which is in the grip of an extended social and economic collapse. Some have drowned.
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The sharp rise in arrivals has turned the chaotic situation on the border into the single most pressing national issue ahead of the presidential elections in November.
Republican governors in places such as Florida have sent National Guard soldiers down to back Abbott in Texas in his stand-off with the federal government, while liberal states such as New York have been deluged with migrants sent over on buses from southern states.
Democrats and Republicans agree: this cannot continue. Yet attempts to resolve the situation have been hampered by high politics.
President Biden, who ran against Donald Trump in 2020 on a promise to end his rival’s “assault on the dignity of immigrant communities”, is today blamed by more than 60 per cent of voters in key swing states for the situation at the border, a Bloomberg poll suggested last week. He is now scrambling to regain the initiative, promising last weekend that if given the power by Congress, “I’d shut down the border right now and fix it quickly”.
For months he has been trying to push through a bipartisan bill to enhance border security, as well as release funding for Ukraine and Israel. But Republicans, while talking constantly about the “crisis” at the border, have blocked it. Last month Trump said passing the bill would hand Democrats a win before the elections, and urged Republicans to stop it.
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While Washington is in meltdown over the arrivals, down in Texas, the soldiers and federal border force agents are trying their best to do their jobs and get along. In Shelby Park, the centre of the stand-off at Eagle Pass, the federal officials send their boats down into the river past the new fortifications built by the National Guard.
They claim the barriers work. In December, Major Perry said, they had thousands of “encounters” a day in this area. On one day last week it was 40.
The problem is that the border is almost 2,000 miles long. For all that the National Guard and the border force say barriers can be a successful deterrent, it is simply not possible to build a wall inside a river, or even right next to one. The concrete would be eroded by the water and it wouldn’t be stable.
“Obviously, we’re not going to be doing this on every single mile,” said Perry. “There are troops and assets everywhere at least monitoring it.”
Migrants and asylum seekers just go around the area fortified by Perry and his men. About five miles north of Shelby Park, on a grey morning last week, a group of a dozen men, women and children from Honduras, Nicaragua and Ecuador waded into the water from Mexico, pulling two small children along with them in a rubber ring. They had reached an island just over halfway across when the riverbed began to drop off beneath them, and they froze, waist-deep in the rushing water.
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From the other side of the bank, we watched as a young Nicaraguan man and two middle-aged men from Ecuador decided to swim for it, pulling the children along with them. They pushed off the bank and into the current, which swept them up at a ferocious speed.
For a moment, it looked as if they wouldn’t make it. One of the older men was dragged further out than the others, and away. But the young man was a very strong swimmer. Somehow, they got onto the bank. The children, a brother and sister, stood shivering on American soil as the men ran down to throw the rubber ring to their companion. They got there just in time: his head was already under the water.
The little girl said her name was Camila and she was nine years old, from Honduras. Her mum was still stuck in the middle of the river. As we watched from the other side, she and her companions shouted for help. We drove to fetch the Border Patrol and found them already on their way.
“Don’t move,” a Spanish-speaking officer called to the migrants across the water. “We’re sending a boat to come and get you.”
When he was a child, he told us, he used to swim in the river. But he couldn’t any more: not after the number of bodies he’d pulled out of there. In those currents, even the strongest swimmers struggle.
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This time, they were lucky. Within half an hour, officers had arrived on a boat and picked them up. Camila’s mum, shaking violently with the cold, gathered up her children in her arms.
Now they would be taken to be processed, their details would be taken and a basic criminal background check carried out. Once they asked for asylum, they would be given a court hearing at the nearest available time. With the current backlog of cases, that would probably be in about three years. Until then they would be free to live and potentially work in the United States.
Solving this delay, and updating the asylum system, say immigration experts, would do more to alleviate the pressure on the border than any wall or coil of razor wire.
Doris Meissner, head of the US immigration policy programme at the Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the US Immigration Service, said the surge in arrivals had been caused by a number of factors, including the dire conditions in the migrants’ home countries and the knowledge that if they do make it to the US, they have a good chance of being able to remain there.
“They are coming to the United States believing, with good reason, that if they are able to make it, and if they file a claim for asylum, they’ll be permitted to come into the country,” she said. “And because there is such a deep backlog of cases, they’re likely to be able to remain in the United States for several years.”
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America’s highly politicised debate, with Republicans in particular talking about the country’s “open borders” and calling for them to be closed as soon as possible, has also filtered through to people looking to cross. Some have decided to seize the moment while they can.
Adding more courts and judges to clear the backlog is less politically explosive than bolstering border defences, and Meissner says adjudicating cases in weeks rather than years is the most important thing authorities could do to ease the problem. Then those whose asylum claim is approved could stay and get on with their lives; the rest would be deported.
Michael Neifach, former principal legal adviser at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the George W Bush administration, said while numbers of arrivals at the moment were unprecedented, politics had for decades been getting in the way of getting the border under control.
“Why this has gone on for 23 years without any significant changes in the immigration laws … that’s the million-dollar question,” he said, adding: “Individuals want to use this as a talking point and an issue for political purposes rather than tackling it, and we end up talking over the same ideas, and the same ways to solve them over, and over again.”
Yet for some, particularly supporters of Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, reform of the asylum system is too distant an idea. Having read online news reports from conspiracy theorists telling them they are being “invaded” by paedophiles and rapists who have been invited in by Biden, they feel they have to come and “protect” the border themselves.
Last week, a convoy calling itself “Take Our Border Back” was heading down to Eagle Pass from Virginia. The National Guard and Border Patrol officers we spoke to didn’t want them to come. But the people in the convoy had convinced themselves they were supporting the troops.
By Friday evening they had pitched up at a local ranch that was flying a Confederate flag in the garden. One man, wearing a shirt with “Allah is Satan” on the front, said he had come to protect the border. Others drove trucks flying “Trump 2024” flags. The former president’s face looked down everywhere. The mood was dark and conspiratorial but also festive, with bunting and fairy lights as a backdrop for occasional bouts of hate speech.
“We think they’re planning something,” said Scott, 62, a self-described patriot who had come down from north Texas, referring to the migrants. “If we need to fight, we’ll have to fight. And if they try to take away our guns, well, that’s another story.”
When asked who he wanted to fight, he replied: “Anyone we have to.”
