Boyd says the county—which sits about 200 miles north of the U.S.–Mexico border—is used as a preparation area for hiding illegal aliens to Houston.
“What happens is they’ll bring them up from the border to somewhere in this area. They’ll drop them off at a temporary holding site and then someone from Houston comes and picks them up and then takes them to Houston, where they’re distributed across the United States,” he said.
Goliad County, with a community of 7,600 people, is one of four Texas counties that published local states of emergency last week due to the influence of the border surge. Three of the counties are placed 40 to 200 miles north of the border but are bargaining with cross-border crime and human smuggling every day.
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In their announcements, each of the counties—Kinney, Goliad, La Salle, and Atascosa—said the “health, life, and property” of their residents are “under imminent threat of disaster from the human trafficking occurring on our border with Mexico.”
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Border Patrol agents arrested more than 76,000 illegal immigrants along the U.S.–Mexico border in the first two weeks of April. Moreover, the average number of illegal aliens who dodge arrest is about 1,000 per day.
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“The ongoing border crisis has resulted in thousands of illegal aliens invading South Texas and overwhelming our local, state, and federal law enforcement,” the Goliad County declaration reads.
“This continual violation of our sovereignty and territorial integrity has resulted in residents of South Texas being assaulted, threatened with violence, and robbed, while also sustaining vast amounts of property damage.”
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The declarations ask that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott deploy additional law enforcement staff and state military units to help curb the crisis.
Goliad County Judge Mike Bennett, who signed his county’s declaration, said he expects 200 or more of Texas’s 254 counties to follow suit.
“We don’t have a lot of redundancy in these small counties and it’s taking up every bit of their resources,” Bennett said during a public meeting in Westache on April 22.
“This needs to be addressed at the source—which is our border—and that’s what we’re hoping our governor will do.”
On April 26, Abbott asked county judges to send him a “full and accurate” assessment of the fiscal influence on their county so he can bill the federal government for costs incurred.