BRACKETTVILLE, Tex. —
There was something about the Dodge Durango that roused the deputy’s suspicions. It sped up. It slowed down. It veered to the center and off the road, kicking up clouds of caliche. It bounced a little more than it should.
Kinney County Sheriff’s Deputy Rolando Escobar followed at a distance, waiting for details from dispatch on the vehicle’s license plates. Then it took off.
“Be careful of that driver,” Escobar radioed to the other deputies joining the pursuit. “Looks like he is reaching down for something.”
Minutes later, the suspected smuggler’s vehicle came to a sudden stop — Escobar’s cruiser nearly crashing into it from behind. The doors swung open and the driver leaped over a four-foot fence. Several passengers darted off into the moonless night. A pepper ball exploded. Deputies tackled two men and quickly arrested three others.
The county has become the showpiece of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s controversial border initiative, Operation Lone Star, which directs troopers to arrest migrant men and charge them with state crimes. Proponents say the $4 billion program is needed in the absence of a stronger federal response. In recent weeks, at least one other county sheriff’s office has joined the operation, bringing the total to nearly 50, roughly a fifth of all Texas counties. Some border sheriffs are preparing to devote more officers to detaining suspected smugglers and border crossers.
Migrant advocates and some community members say Kinney County’s leaders have gone too far. Residents in the county of 3,200 people routinely stumble across deputies chasing smugglers like NASCAR drivers. Boulders line the front of local schools to prevent vehicles from smashing into classrooms. The town has one ambulance crew frequently tied up with the aftermath of pursuits.
Civil rights groups have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Operation Lone Star for allegations of racial profiling and discrimination. They contend Texas is usurping the federal government’s immigration enforcement responsibility by creating its own unilateral system that weaponizes state law and puts migrants in danger.
“It has become the media star of the anti-immigrant movement,” Bob Libal, a civil rights consultant for Human Rights Watch, said of Kinney County. “They have achieved the goal of heightening the rhetoric and bringing us to a place in Texas that 10 years ago would have been unimaginable.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, for his part, believes capturing migrants is the best way to protect both his residents and those trying to enter the United States.
“For every one that we stop, every group that we catch that’s being smuggled, I feel like we’re saving somebody a life of grief,” Coe said. “You get wrapped up in the sex trade, is it a better life?”
At the scene of the Dodge Durango chase, officers found an older Mexican woman and her husband in tears hiding inside the sport-utility vehicle. The woman rested her head against her husband’s shoulder while they sat on the ground between patrol vehicles flashing red and blue lights.
“We’re here because they killed our whole family,” the woman’s husband said. The couple began to sob, saying they were from Guerrero, a lawless southern Mexican state where warring criminal organizations have pushed the homicide rate to one of the highest in the country. They were quickly escorted away before sharing their names with a reporter.
As he stepped into a Border Patrol van, the man said, “We’re the only ones left.”
THE SHERIFF
‘I have to fight tooth and toenail’
A web of lonely roads winds from the Rio Grande to Brackettville. The two-streetlight town sits on U.S. Highway 90 between official border crossings in Del Rio to the west, Eagle Pass to the southeast and a checkpoint heading northeast to Uvalde. That makes Kinney County a choke point attractive to migrants and smugglers trying to evade authorities.
Coe spent 30 years working for Border Patrol and had hoped for a quiet second act busting small-time drug dealers and reading books to schoolchildren when he signed up for the job. The community is known mostly for an old frontier garrison. Residents also proudly note it was the backdrop for John Wayne’s 1960 film “The Alamo.”
But when President Biden assumed office, Coe said his community came “under siege.” Federal authorities made 1.7 million and 2.4 million arrests respectively in 2021 and 2022 at the Southwest border — and the Del Rio sector, where Kinney County is located, became one of the busiest in that time.
It took little time for Coe’s resource-strapped force to be overwhelmed.
“I have to fight tooth and toenail to protect my ranchers and hunters,” Coe said from his office, where stacks of reports are piled next to a large-lettered study Bible and Donald Trump bumper stickers. He is worried that frustrations with migration will push the county’s tax base out.
“If we lose them,” he said, “I lose the county.”
Coe started airing his frustrations in Facebook videos in which he had imaginary conversations with a cardboard cutout of Vice President Harris. In one 2021 video, he asked “Kardbord Kamala,” as he called the effigy, what her plans were for thousands of Haitian migrants camping out under a border bridge in Del Rio.
“Why are we on our own?” he asked.
The camera panned right to the cutout as a recording of Harris laughing played. Soon Fox News was calling to interview him on border security. Then came meetings with former Trump officials, conspiracy theorists, vigilante groups and, ultimately, Abbott.
“I had every militia group in the world call me wanting to help,” Coe said.
For many county leaders, the issue hit close to home. County Judge John Paul Schuster said his family has had several unsettling experiences with men walking through their property in recent years. They got a dog and don’t leave the house before daybreak.
As deputies wrapped up interrogating the Mexican couple found in the Dodge Durango, news of another smuggling attempt crackled across the dispatch radio.
Kinney County Deputy Sheriff Liz Aguirre stopped a blue Mitsubishi with expired tags. She spotted two people slouched in a back seat. A 21-year-old San Antonio woman driving the car said the female passengers were her aunts. According to an arrest report, she told the deputy that both were lying down because they were taking a nap.
Aguirre didn’t buy it. She detained the driver. Inside the vehicle, deputies found two more suspected migrants crouched in the trunk. In all, four young women trying to cross the border were taken into custody. One pulled her long obsidian hair across her face to obscure it as officers turned her over to Border Patrol.
Most migrants caught in Kinney County are turned over to Border Patrol and deported. But the sheriff’s office is also on pace to make more than 900 human smuggling arrests on state charges this year. That figure would eclipse the total number of similar arrests in the past two years combined — a stunning increase in a county that previously had only a handful of jury trials.
While Coe and county leaders hold up those numbers as a sign of success, others point to concerning stories behind the arrests.
The American Civil Liberties Union in Texas obtained documents describing a June incident in which the sheriff removed four men suspected of being smuggled from the country by driving them from a crash scene to a port of entry. County sheriffs do not have the authority to deport.
When asked about the incident, Coe said the men had refused medical treatment but Border Patrol wasn’t willing to take them into custody without it. He didn’t have time to wait, so he said he took the migrants to the border himself.
Arrest records reviewed by The Washington Post show instances in which Kinney County property owners have detained migrants at rifle-point, in a sign of how tense the situation has grown. Rights advocates also point to sheriff’s deputies citing dubious legal reasons for traffic stops. One state trooper stopped a vehicle on a county road in June, suspicious of its tinted windows. He determined the tint was legal but said a smell prompted him to investigate further.
“I identified the smell as an odor that is associated with human smuggling,” Cpl. Orlando Rivera wrote. “Undocumented aliens emit a distinct odor due to sweat and being exposed to the environment.”
The trooper found two Mexican migrants in the trunk and arrested the driver for felony smuggling.
Abbott’s office has defended the state’s approach, noting in a recent press release that thousands of pounds of fentanyl and weapons have been seized and more than 360,000 migrants detained as part of Operation Lone Star.
“Every individual who is apprehended or arrested and every ounce of drugs seized would have otherwise made their way into communities across Texas and the nation due to President Joe Biden’s open border policies,” the governor said.
Civil rights leaders say the approach hasn’t proved effective in curbing migration, but lawmakers are doubling down. Bills creating a Texas border protection unit with the power to detain and deport migrants are advancing swiftly through the state legislature. Some of the text mirrors Kinney County’s disaster declaration.
“We are seeing some of the most dangerous legislation on the border being proposed in Austin,” Roberto Lopez, an organizer with the Texas Civil Rights Project, said. “It’s built on the invasion rhetoric Kinney advocates.”
Roberto Mejía, 32, was arrested and charged with trespassing in Kinney County in October 2021. The child psychologist from Honduras said he tried to enter legally at the Del Rio crossing but was told he could not apply for asylum because the Title 42 policy remained in effect. Desperate, he jumped into the Rio Grande, despite not knowing how to swim.
Mejía said members of the Texas National Guard found his group soon afterward and instructed them to walk onto the nearby train tracks — private property. They were all immediately apprehended.
“We need to make immigration laws much easier and more accessible for the people who generally want to be here for good reasons,” Hill said. “But we also need to deter anyone coming here for anything less than that.”
Gage Brown, a working artist whose ranching family has been in the county for five generations, said the intense focus on border enforcement is taking away from other pressing needs. Brackettville is experiencing a teacher shortage, and drought has left local waterways dry. Domestic violence and drug abuse are persistent ills.
