Texas has stepped up efforts in recent weeks to physically bar migrants from entering the country through his Operation Lone Star, and the most aggressive initiatives have been targeted at Eagle Pass, where the state has strung miles of razor wire and deployed a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande, according to the Houston Chronicle.
An email from a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) trooper described conditions along the border at Eagle Pass that the officer himself characterized as “inhumane.”
The DPS trooper Nicholas Wingate raised several concerns to a superior early this month, including accounts of a pregnant woman who was having a miscarriage and caught in the wire; a four-year-old girl who passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through it and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers; and a teenager who broke his leg trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father.
According to the trooper, officers have also been ordered to refuse water to migrants, who are traveling in extreme heat that can top 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and to push them back into the water. These efforts have deterred some migrants; they’ve also injured and possibly killed many others.
“The U.S.-Mexico border is becoming an increasingly inhumane and often deadly zone — and a national shame,” New York-based journalist Jill Filipovic on Tuesday wrote for CNN in regard of the exposure by the trooper.
