EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Texas has wrestled away control of immigration enforcement from the federal government after stationing thousands of troops and installing miles of razor wire along the Rio Grande, members of several civil rights organizations said on Wednesday.
Those troops and barriers become a “gantlet” that prevents asylum-seekers from surrendering to the Border Patrol, say advocates who allege witnessing Texas National Guard members push migrants back toward Mexico, fire non-lethal projectiles or direct them to private land where they are charged with trespassing.
“We have treated people who sustained injuries from canisters (launched) by the National Guard, injuries from the concertina wire, injured by rubber bullets,” said Dylan Corbett, executive director of Hope Border Institute in El Paso. “The U.S.-Mexico border is 2,000 miles long; more than 1,100 miles are in Texas. Texas has effectively taken control of immigration enforcement on more than 50 percent of the border. […] Twenty-year-olds with automatic weapons are now administering immigration law.”
The groups are calling on the federal government to “more aggressively” step in and assert its exclusive right to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. The Biden administration last year sued Texas over a 1,000-foot barrier of buoys placed in the Rio Grande south of Eagle Pass. A federal judge issued an injunction against the state, but the 5 th Circuit Court of Appeals later vacated the order.
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Other advocates participating in a Wednesday online seminar sponsored by the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) also alleged Texas’ “militarization” of the border is pushing migrants to dangerous clandestine crossing points and that Department of Public Safety troopers participating in Operation Lone Star are not being held accountable for high-speed chases of vehicles that often result in deaths and injuries…