Texas’ Harsh New Border Tactics Are Injuring Migrants
As some in her group threw inflatables and blankets over the concertina wire to avoid injury, she said, the agents began yelling, “Go back to Mexico!” and “If you cross, we are going to arrest and charge you.”
Then, she said, an agent wearing a brown uniform and a cowboy hat who appeared to be a Texas state trooper roughly pulled a blanket off the barrier as people were climbing over it. The abrupt maneuver caused a young woman to hit her face on a spike, leaving a gash on her forehead, Ms. Escobar recalled. She said several of the agents stood still for several minutes, until an officer wearing what looked like a soldier’s uniform offered help to the wounded woman.
State officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.
“I was still in the river, about to jump over, when I saw what that agent did and was horrified,” she said of the officer in the cowboy hat. “She was crying, saying, ‘Help me, help me.’”
Because of the increased number of migrants being taken to the lone hospital in Eagle Pass, residents have often been waiting up to eight hours to receive medical care, said Mayor Rolando Salinas Jr. “I support legal migration and orderly law enforcement,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “What I am against is the use of tactics that hurt people.”
The tactics by Texas appear to have intensified in the lead-up to the lifting in late May of Title 42, a public health policy imposed during the coronavirus pandemic that allowed federal agents to rapidly expel most arriving migrants.
Source: The New York Times
