"We used to have a National Guard posted there," Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera explained while driving along a dirt road that runs parallel with the border nest to the Hidalgo port of entry late one evening recently. "There was another one right over here, but they took that guy, too."
Cabrera is the vice president of the Border Patrol union's Rio Grande Valley chapter. On a 12-mile drive along roads that agents use to reach the overgrown land along the Rio Grande, Cabrera points out a sum of 11 places where National Guard soldiers had been posted all summer. They operated mobile camera towers and could further call in sightings of illegal immigrants or drug smugglers trying to sneak through the brush.
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Presently, no one is keeping watch, and Cabrera admits that agents, half of whom have been removed from the field to transport and process illegal crossers in custody, do not even know who is coming through in those unguarded spaces. Cabrera called it "wide open."
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"We were already stretched thin with their help and having them here relieved a lot of pressure on us," Cabrera announced. "Now they took away manpower that we can't really afford for them to take away."
Reinforcements were called in at the beginning of summer. In June, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott solicited help from other states to patrol the border as more migrants were coming across than any other time in the past two decades. Arkansas and South Dakota sent in state National Guard soldiers, while state troopers were called in from Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio.
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Though, four months since Abbott's call for assistance, almost all have modestly returned home, according to data presented by the Texas Division of Emergency Management and the Texas Military Department. The 48 soldiers from South Dakota were called back. Of the state police, all 14 in Ohio, 26 in Nebraska, 28 in Iowa, and 69 from Florida have been pulled from the line, unable to endlessly work out of state.
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Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, declared on Wednesday that the state could not proceed with the costs, while other governors have declared their states need law enforcement back in their communities.
As of Friday, just 11 soldiers from outside Texas are the only out-of-state military or law enforcement help Texas has on the border, less than a tenth of the personnel who were there this summer.
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