By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
First of two parts
Val Verde County Attorney David Martinez said local arrests of migrants on criminal trespass charges may be acting as a deterrent to migrants trying to enter the county.
Martinez recently spoke to the 830 Times about the process by which a fraction of the persons entering the country illegally through Val Verde County are being arrested and charged with the state offense of criminal trespass, a misdemeanor.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced the move to arrest migrants for trespassing, part of his Operation Lone Star initiative, during a visit to Del Rio in June.
Martinez said when he learned of the new state directive, “we knew immediately there were going to be some issues we had to resolve before we could really make any real commitment to prosecuting these cases or following up on these cases.”
The first problem, Martinez said, was there was no room in the jail, and local law enforcement officers were having to make the decision “which person should we leave out and which person should we take in?”
“It’s not fair to ask anybody to make those decisions, and we were forced to,” he added.
Martinez said he and local law enforcement officials were told by the Texas Department of Public Safety to expect 20 to 50 migrant arrests daily.
“Our problem was, if we arrest 20 people tomorrow, where are we going to put those 20?” Martinez said.
He said state officials, including the Office of Court Administration in Austin, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the Texas Department of Corrections and the Texas Indigent Defense Council began working on options.
A large tent processing center was placed in the parking lot between the sheriff’s office and the jail/detention center being run by GEO, and the Office of Court Administration, through the Supreme Court of Texas, secured the services of about 30 retired district judges to magistrate migrants arrested under Operation Lone Star directives, Martinez said.
The state also made available a 1,000-bed detention facility in Dilley for housing migrants arrested for criminal trespass. Court proceedings are carried out via Zoom, a method Texas courts initiated and perfected during the COVID pandemic.
Martinez said the criminal trespass arrests began in Val Verde County July 20.
“There were just a handful initially, and I think maybe on the heaviest days here in Val Verde County, we had about 30 to 35 arrests for criminal trespass,” Martinez said.
The county attorney said he believed when the arrests were first announced there were some misconceptions.
“I think there was a misconception by some folks, probably by folks who aren’t familiar with Del Rio, maybe from other parts of the state and certainly other parts of the country, and I think the misconception was that anybody crossing the river was going to be arrested for criminal trespass,” he said.
“Well, the simple crossing of a river, of a boundary, doesn’t mean that you’ve committed criminal trespass. Criminal trespass has to involve a private property owner, who has not invited or welcomed individuals onto their property, and the individual traverses that property, whether they jump a fence or walk through a gate or whatever the case may be, and they had notice that they weren’t welcome there. Then they’ve committed the offense of criminal trespass,” he added.
He pointed out, though, some tracts of land along the Rio Grande are owned by the government, and persons crossing those lands would not be arrested and charged with criminal trespass.
Between July 20 and Sept. 1, about 250 total arrests were made in Val Verde County, Martinez said.
The county attorney noted all of those arrested on the criminal trespass charges were men not traveling as part of a family unit.
“My understanding was, when Operation Lone Star was devised, that it was never the intent of the state of Texas to break up a family, so that if there were family units that were encountered, that they would not be arrested for criminal trespass,” he said.
Martinez said to date, there have already been two “Operation Lone Star” dockets for those arrested migrants.
“We’ve disposed of about 32 to 34 cases. There were a handful of those that were dismissed. A couple of them were in the interests of justice because of medical hardships. A few of them were because we discovered as we were doing the intake of the cases here in my office that some of the individuals were, in fact, separated from their families, so we dismissed their cases,” Martinez said.
“There were probably about 28 or 29 that pleaded guilty to criminal trespass. At the time that we had their hearings, they had been detained for about 17 or 18 days in Dilley, and the hearings were conducted via Zoom, and they were given jail sentences of 15 days. So, every one of them had their judgment already satisfied by the time they entered their plea,” the county attorney added.
Each of the arrested migrants then must go through the immigration review process they would have undergone had they not been arrested on the state charge, he said.
Martinez said in the recent weeks, the number of migrants illegally entering the country has begun to decline.
So are the arrests beginning to act as a deterrent?
“It could be multiple things. People are very smart . . . it could be that now they know there are consequences, maybe they’re not coming. But there is another factor to consider in the declining numbers we’ve experienced in the last week, and that is the Supreme Court’s ruling last week, basically denying the Biden administration’s removal of the Trump policy of ‘remain in Mexico,’” Martinez said.
In either case, the county attorney said, migrants may be hearing that the U.S. “welcome mat” is no longer out.
Part Two: Challenges created by migrant arrests
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