By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Editor’s Note: Because of the length of Tuesday’s press conference in Kinney County regarding the declaration of local disaster due to an ongoing “invasion” of unauthorized immigrants, and the numerous people who spoke, there will be several stories highlighting the points of view expressed by the speakers at said press conference to the media gathered.
BRACKETTVILLE – Several south Texas county judges and mayors agree with Kinney County Judge Tully Shahan, saying their communities are being invaded by immigrants who have cross the Texas-Mexico border illegally.
Shahan called a press conference Tuesday to announce he had signed a disaster declaration, saying the numbers of undocumented migrants and the levels of human trafficking and drug smuggling in Kinney County constitutes an invasion as defined by the Texas and U.S. Constitutions.
After welcoming the large group of journalists, Shahan introduced Terrell County Judge Dale Lynn Carruthers.
“Terrell County consists of 91 miles of border frontage. Terrell County is a very desolate region of Texas, and I’m here today to represent my county as the constitutional judge standing up for our constitutional rights. We are actually here to protect the sovereignty of our nation, not just the border of Texas. I’m also a rancher, and I’m here to represent the ranching community,” Carruthers told journalists.
She said she has a 17,000-acre ranch with frontage along the Texas-Mexico border.
“It is being inundated. It is being invaded. Just in the month of May alone, in a pasture right behind my house, there was 49 illegals apprehended, and that’s not all. In my community, we have less than 1,000 residents, and every day they live in fear of the invasion,” the county judge said.
Goliad County Judge Mike Bennett spoke next.
“We’re about midway between Houston and Brackettville, so we get a lot of stopovers. In our county, (we have) a lot of fence damage, stolen vehicles, damage to private property, and what you need to understand is we’re a very, very poor county. We have two stoplights in our county. Our sheriff’s office has two deputies on duty at any given time,” Bennett said.
Bennett said his county sees three to four “bailouts” by immigrants being smuggled through the area every week, noting these events involve all of the sheriff’s office’s limited resources and personnel and leave the rest of the county unprotected.
“This is not a situation where we’re helping these migrants come across, these illegal migrants coming across. This is a situation where many are dying along the way. There’s a lot of carnage left in their wake. We’re here today to ask the governor to do more. Clearly it’s the responsibility of the United States government to do this, and clearly, they’re not going to do a thing,” Bennett said.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin also spoke to the group.
“We’re about 70 miles from the border. What we deal with constantly is the coyotes (smugglers) bringing people through our community. The smugglers, when the police go to stop them, they bail out in our community. Our citizens are having to deal with it. We also have the train that they check at Uvalde and off that train we’ve gotten pedophiles, convicted murderers, drug dealers, gang members … it’s a nightmare,” McLaughlin said.
“And with the tragedy that we just had (the school shooting at Robb Elementary School), our kids are going to be going back to school in the next 45 days or so, and here we’re going to start again with the bail-outs by the schools and so forth.
“It needs to stop . . . The federal government is not going to do it. Seventy-five percent of our Border Patrol today is processing paperwork, and they’re not out there in the field doing their jobs, which they need to be doing. We have to address this. We’re not doing these people any favors. We’re setting them up for failure. We’re turning them loose in this country with nowhere to go, no jobs, no work permit, no nothing. So how are these people surviving? That’s the question you need to ask yourselves if we send them all over the country . . . If anything, we need to make them come across the right way, so we know who they are and where they’re going,” he said.
Brackettville Mayor Eric Martinez said the problems addressed by the county judges and McLaughlin “are really true.”
“In the morning, when kids go to school, they (undocumented migrants) are walking onto our campus, trying to blend in, trying to be undetected, and then they make their way past the school, and at that point they get picked up somewhere else. They’ll be out by our cemetery. They’ll be out by the rest area. They find ways to get there.
“We definitely need the help. That’s the bottom line . . . The sheriff’s office does its damn best and they do a good job. They get everything done, and they do what they can, when they’re spread thin,” Martinez said.
Shahan took to the podium and spoke about the issues in Kinney County.
“Kinney County, in the month of May, had over 4,000 illegal aliens who came through here and were not apprehended. They were not accounted for, and they’re somewhere in this United States, residing.
“Kinney County started out with just a few folks coming through, but that’s no longer the case. We have chases daily. We have chases in the middle of the night. We had a chase 10 days ago, a young man had six people he was smuggling in his car. While he’s driving down Highway 90 after going through the streets of Brackettville, he pulls his .22 automatic pistol out, sticks it out the window and starts shooting at oncoming traffic,” Shahan said.
“This is real. We want America to know that this is real. This is not a photo-op. This is real country, Texas. This is real county, Texas. America doesn’t know. They don’t know what’s happening here, and we’re here to change that. We don’t want to lose America. The Biden Administration won’t do a thing about it. They could stop this thing this hour. They could stop it now. They don’t have the guts, but they have a plan. And their plan is to keep bringing them in. Open borders. If we keep our open borders, we’re not going to have a nation,” the Kinney County judge added.
Shahan said the same scenarios are repeating themselves in counties across south and central Texas.
“So that’s why we wanted to get together, and we wanted to tell you what the plight of the people is in Kinney County. We’re trying to protect our folks, and we’re not ashamed to do that. We need to do it, but we need help. Our governor needs to help. We don’t believe we’re going to get any help from the Biden Administration . . . We felt like we should go out and declare that we’re being invaded, which we are,” Shahan said.
Shahan said he further believes “the Biden Administration is using this as a political act to bring people to the United States so that they can go vote.”
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