THE HEART AND HUMANITY BEHIND DEL RIO, A BORDER TOWN IN CRISIS

October 2021

In October 2021, the national spotlight focused on the southwestern Texas town of 36,000. The fight over the migrants’ fate tore at the fabric of Del Rio, stretching its residents further and further apart. The community residents felt proud of their community, but there was a lingering sense that their neighborhoods began to change. Some residents no longer felt safe or protected along those same riverbanks.

DEL RIO — In the dining room of Mesquite Creek Outfitters, Thomas Cabello, 46, sat perched on a barstool with his hand wrapped around a bottle of Lone Star.

“This is only my second beer,” he said.

The dining room of Mesquite Creek Outfitters vibrated with customers ordering draft beer under rustic blackboards. Bartenders served draft beer in pint glasses and reminded patrons they could keep the tumblers (the restaurant’s monthly promotion). Amid a quiet town, Mesquite prides itself on being the most hip and happening place, Cabello said.

Cabello, a principal at the San Felipe Del Rio Consolidated Independent School District, frequented the bar since its doors opened in 2017, almost two decades after moving to Del Rio. He volunteered in the kitchen on Fridays, washing glasses in the back.

Three miles away, an estimated 14,000 unauthorized migrants (primarily Haitian) huddled together in ragged, makeshift encampments. Under the Del Rio International Bridge — a 2,035-foot stretch of pavement connecting Texas to the northeastern Mexican city of Acuña — people awaited U.S. government officials’ fateful decisions. Arrest. Relocation. Deportation.

Reporters swarmed the riverbanks of the Rio Grande as the Texas National Guard armed fenced-in checkpoints.

Over the last week, the national spotlight fixated on the southwestern Texas town of 36,000.

The fight over the migrants’ fate tore at the fabric of Del Rio, stretching its residents further and further apart. The residents felt proud of their community, but there was a lingering sense that their neighborhoods began to change. Some residents no longer felt safe or protected along those same riverbanks.

Governor Greg Abbott addressed the state a few hours prior that day, saying, "the Biden Administration’s failure to enforce immigration laws and halt illegal crossings on a federal dam poses life-threatening risks to Texans and the migrants themselves."

Texas border towns have witnessed an uptick in illegal border crossings since President Joe Biden became president in January 2020. Still, the Haitian surge at the southwestern border surprised and overwhelmed state and federal employees alike.

The Biden Administration didn’t account for the influx of an estimated 60,000 Haitians, many of whom had fled Haiti months and even years ago. Juan Ramón de la Fuente, Mexico’s Permanent Representative, told the U.N. Security Council that the immigrants had temporarily stayed in Colombia and Panama prior to arriving at the border.

Inside Mesquite Creek Outfitters, a typical Tuesday evening settled in. Cabello reached for his beer and softly chuckled at the cup of coffee to his left. “That’s not what you drink at this place,” he said.

The quiet streets outside the bar painted a surreal portrait of the soft-spoken community.

A young couple rubbing shoulders slick with sweat ran side-by-side down the sidewalk. The faded beat of hip-hop playing from a local gym echoed through the street.

Benches stood barren, stores closed.

Twenty years ago, Cabello’s wife said she’d never return to her hometown of Del Rio because of its utter stillness. “There’s nothing to do there,” she told him once the couple moved to Laredo after marriage. Cabello, a Laredo native, considered the stillness the town’s best-kept secret.

“I would tease my wife when we’d come down to visit, and it seemed like the world would start spinning slower.”

Kathy Raabe said Del Rio fostered a community where children carelessly ran through the streets, and most residents wouldn’t think twice about leaving their doors unlocked. Raabe, a 56-year-old born and raised in Del Rio, spent her young adulthood living in San Antonio and Austin, never really considering either city home.

As time passed, she felt an unrelenting pull towards her hometown, her family. Del Rio boasted a small-town charm nowhere else in Texas could replicate. It was an oasis amidst the semi-arid, lower Rio Grande Valley. In 1987, Raabe moved back and gave birth to her eldest son the following year.

The essence of Del Rio was found in its unity; “people tend to care for each other here,” Cabello said.

February’s state-wide snowstorm, he said, was the perfect example. Severe winter weather overwhelmed the community — who had little to no experience with snow— but they confronted the disastrous conditions with action. Neighbors came together, volunteering their services. A local man pumped water out of a nearby creek for his neighbors whose pipes froze; others walked the streets, handing out bottled water.

Heart and perseverance abounded the town. Even their relationship with Mexico proved positive. Raabe described living minutes from Mexico as a beautiful experience, especially for her children, who could step out of their Americanized bubble briefly, she said.

Accompanied by missionaries, Raabe and her family volunteered their time across the border in rural, less fortunate communities, delivering food.

“We never felt threatened or afraid at all,” she said. “There wasn’t that situation in Acuña or towns further south.”

Nestled in the back of Sanel’s Fabrics, Nelda Vasquez, 76, and her sister Sarai Cardenas, 81, sat low to the ground in antique, wooden chairs, buried in a room of multi-colored textiles. The women spoke of a deportation bus overtaken by migrants that day. Vasquez’s thoughts resorted to her son, who worked for the U.S. Border Patrol & Customs, assisting with buses just like that one every day.

“It scared me to death,” she said.

Both women had relatives who worked diligently to protect their town’s border. At times like this, the news struck a sensitive chord and the constant media coverage, they agreed, only worsened matters.

Even though both Vasquez and Cardenas understood the bleak conditions in Haiti, they couldn’t help but ask 'why here.'

Del Rio had never encountered any significant problems at their border. In the past, border towns such as Eagle Pass, 60 miles southeast, witnessed the bulk of migrant crossing. Even the Rio Grande Valley, they said, experienced a higher volume of migrants at their port entry, Camargo International Bridge.

The most recent migrant waves fled Haiti en masse after President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination and the 7.2 earthquake in August.

According to INTERPOL, nearly 1,000 migrant children traveled through Latin America via a criminal human trafficking ring. About 12,000 arrived in Mexico’s southernmost state, Chiapas; others made it farther north to Coahuila.

“They’re not posing, and they’re not pretending; they have to move,” Tom Ricker, a Program Associate with the Quixote Center, a multi-issue social justice group, said, “they’re in desperate situations,” Ricker noted a common perception amongst migrants that the United States offers more safety and opportunities than their countries.

This is not always the case.

Haitian migration isn’t new to the United States; Haitians have long sought asylum here than in any other country. Immigration to Haiti has intensified due to natural disasters and civil unrest.

The U.N. General Assembly Summit for Refugees and Migrants in 2016 called on wealthier nations to provide timely and dependable humanitarian funding and invest in refugee communities. In his opening address to the Summit, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the Council to reframe the global mindset around migrants and refugees from seeing them as burdens to assets. “We must place the human rights of all refugees and migrants at the heart of our commitments,” Ki-Moon said.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas echoed these sentiments five years later in Del Rio, defining the situation at the southwest border as “challenging and heartbreaking” during an interview on CNN in mid-September.

Still, human rights heeded to deep-seated political conviction: “if you come to the United States illegally, you will be returned. Your journey will not succeed, and you will be endangering your life and your family’s life.”

American politicians hadn’t prioritized Latin American immigration on their agendas until after World War II when tensions rose at the Southwest border under Operation Wetback. “Wetback” — an epithet dating back to the 1920s used to describe migrants who swam across the Rio Grande — was the first (of many) initiatives to address illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Before Operation Wetback, border crossings went relatively unchecked, and immigration policy largely disregarded Mexicans or Latin Americans. Latinx workers traveled back and forth between the countries, extending labor for cheap compensation. Texas Rangers (also known as “The Frontier Battalion”) patrolled the land for bandits and Native Americans. But, the hostility and paranoia that have come to define the U.S.-Mexican border didn’t exist.

Today the Texas-Mexico border represents as much of an ideological boundary as a physical one.

Ricker said hundreds of miles of fencing built in the 1990s redirected migrants into the desert and stranded there: “the Biden Administration, just like President Trump, has put pressure to stop people coming from the border, and that’s left many people stuck in southern Mexico.”

Roberto Marquez, 59, a Dallas-based artist and social activist, stood almost 200 yards away from the International Bridge in Del Rio, surveying a freshly painted sign that read, “Stop Deportations Now.” He’d spent the coming days since the beginning of the migrant surge rallying support for the migrants through his art.

“I know it’s complicated, political,” he said. “But, I was an illegal immigrant at one time, and I was deported. I know how that feels to be in fear with no money; it’s difficult.”

Asylum seekers must present “credible fear of persecution or torture” consistent with federal law to obtain asylum, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Approved candidates then refer to an immigration court where they must submit a formal asylum application.

The court rarely accepted asylum-seeking applications, Ricker said. Once the migrants are under the jurisdiction of border control, he said many would be back in Mexico within two hours.

Since Sept. 17 — when the migrants first arrived — Del Rio’s dynamic changed, Raabe said. “Things have been different.” Children stopped roaming the streets. Residents have started locking doors more often. Once bound by mutual pride and integrity, a community now sought solace through solitude. Hospitality gave way to an impending fear that the situation would grow further awry.

Neighbors cautioned one another from using outdoor spaces, saying they may run into the “unexpected company” of illegal migrants. Some of them acted out of their own volition to protect their property.

Throughout September, U.S. officials boarded migrants on U.S. aircraft to Haiti. Nearly 8,000 migrants retreated to Mexico either voluntarily or by force.

By Sept. 20, the migrants had dwindled to about 5,000, and by the weekend of Sept. 24, traffic on the International Bridge returned to normal. Del Rio became another headline, lost in the discourse of the 24-hour news cycle.