By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
It took the work of a community to clean the site of a huge migrant encampment under the Del Rio International Bridge.
Assistant City Public Works Director Greg Velazquez said a total of 730,340 pounds were collected from the migrant encampment during its period of operation in mid-September. He said cleanup efforts went into high gear after the last migrants left the site, and the trash and debris from the encampment were taken to the landfill.
He said a number of local private companies, including Red River Waste Solutions, the city’s trash collection and landfill operator, assisted with the cleanup effort.
A variety of heavy equipment was also used, including bulldozers, trash trucks, front-end loaders, skid steers, shredders and brush collection trucks.
“We all worked together to clean up the area. It was a lot of trash,” Velazquez said.
Among the local businesses contracted to assist with the cleanup was Gearhart Property Services, a new business owned and operated by Tyson Gearhart.
“We’d seen on the news how dirty the area appeared to be. I was talking to my family, and I had just started my roll-off rental property cleanup business. It was my second week, so I talked to some of my wife’s family and my family, and they gave me the name of a person to contact, which was Billy Whaley, who owns B&J Tractor Service here,” Gearhart said.
“I got ahold of him, and he said, let’s see what we can do, so he called back and said I could subcontract for him, and I went down there, but the first day I went down there, there were still so many migrants there that just getting my truck and trailer to the area was pretty difficult and I just took out one load. It was hard even turning around,” Gearhart added.
Gearhart said photos and videos of the site couldn’t convey its reality.
“You really don’t know what it’s like until you get down there. And it’s not only the sight of everything, it was the smells, all of it. I’m a Marine, and I’ve been to Iraq, and that was my first impression when I went down there, that it was just like a third world country, right there under the bridge. It didn’t even look like Texas,” Gearhart said.
As the cleanup got underway, Gearhart said he worked with Whaley and other contractors, like Del Rio’s AV Trucking Co. to try and clean up as much of the mess as quickly as possible.
Everything left behind when the migrants were evacuated from the site was bulldozed into piles, and then those piles were scooped into roll-offs like Gearhart’s, as well as dump trucks, and hauled to the city landfill.
Gearhart said he hauled a number of loads from the encampment to the landfill. He estimated he hauled close to 45,000 pounds of debris from the site.
“It was all of us working together, first responders, Border Patrol, local businesses, we all just got together and said, ‘What can we do?’ And we did it, all by working together,” Gearhart said.
Val Verde County Judge Lewis G. Owens Jr., who closely monitored the situation while it was ongoing, said the county did not play a major role in the cleanup.
“We were asked at the beginning if we could help clean up, and we said yes, but basically, the federal government stepped in, and they had contractors down there to take care of it. They have a contract with individuals to take care of the fence, take care of that property, so that’s how it got started, and they said they would step up and do it,” Owens said.
The county judge visited the site of the migrant encampment every day and spoke about the scope of the cleanup efforts.
“You figure on Sept. 15, there were no huts. There was nothing right next to the bridge, and then Friday and Saturday, it was unbelievable. Everything on the east side of the bridge just became huts and shelters. There was an area on the east side of the bridge where a chain link fence parallels the bridge and all that, between the bridge and the fence, was full of huts,” Owens said.
“They made these shelters out of carrizo cane, cardboard boxes, plastic bags, clothing, and then you went past the fence farther east, along the river, and that’s where it got really complicated, because you had people that had built inside the tree line, inside the cane,” he said.
Cleaning the area after the migrants left it, he said, was not merely a matter of picking up litter and debris.
He said equipment used to clean up the site included front-end loaders capable of picking up six or seven yards of materials in one scoop, trailers to haul off trash and debris and claw trucks to pick up all of the cane stalks that had been cut for shelters.
“It was unreal,” the county judge said.
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