By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez loaded several cases of bottled water into the bed of his pickup.
“In case we run into somebody down there,” he said as he climbed back into the cab.
Martinez on Friday morning took the 830 Times on a tour of some of the areas where immigrants can be found as they move into and out of Del Rio.
Martinez has begun sounding the alarm that the end of Title 42 deportations by the United States, expected in April, may mean an unprecedented spike in the number of immigrants moving through the county.
The first locale we visited was the Stripes convenience store on Veterans Boulevard. Small knots of immigrants could be seen outside the store, along a cinderblock wall on its southern perimeter.
Many of the migrants carried the manila envelopes given to them at the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition migrant processing center on Las Vacas Street. The envelopes contain their immigration paperwork, including information about the federal courts where their asylum hearings will be held.
One small group of men had moved away from Stripes and stood near the traffic control box at Veterans and 15th Street just north of the convenience store. They appeared to be repacking bottled drinks and snacks purchased in the store.
The sheriff turned his truck south onto Veterans, and we passed several more immigrant groups walking south.
We crossed the railroad overpass at the south end of Veterans and turned onto Garfield and continued onto Las Vacas Street. The sheriff turned onto Holmig Street along the migrant processing center, and we looked at a group of immigrants outside the center, most of them on their cell phones.
Next, we headed to the border proper, the border fence that parallels Frontera Road. All was quiet, though Martinez spoke about encountering several groups of immigrants near the fence in previous weeks.
We also visited another “immigrant hot spot” along the border, Vega Verde Road, right next to the Rio Grande.
We drove northwest on the road to its public end, made a u-turn and returned the same way we came.
We passed a group of Texas Guardsmen and -women working on the “Greg Abbott” border fence. The fence has been up only a few months, and the sheriff showed me at least a dozen places where immigrants have already cut through the chain link, and the fence has been hastily patched.
The sheriff said he thought the fence was more for show than anything else and told me he believes the money being spent here would be better used on manpower and technology.
We passed several Texas Department of Public Safety troopers as we headed down an unpaved section of the road near the former Bordelon house, a property that became infamous in the early days of the immigrant tide a year ago when hundreds of immigrants waded through the Rio Grande and took their first step onto U.S. soil there.
From the road, we could see several white pickup trucks on a bluff above the Mexico side of the Rio Grande. The trucks had insignia on their doors, perhaps that of some law enforcement agency.
Closer to the river, a large white cross has been erected on the Mexico side, perhaps a recuerdo to commemorate one or several of the many immigrants who have drowned crossing this deceptively dangerous river.
Our last stop on Friday’s tour was Guyler Lane just south of the Del Rio city limits, a site where immigrants who have crossed the Rio Grande illegally often stop and wait for Border Patrol or other law enforcement agencies to pick them up.
It was a beautiful spring morning in Del Rio, and all seemed quiet along the border, but Martinez worried aloud that what we were seeing was simply the calm before the storm.
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