Ranchers in South Texas are bracing for what they expect will be a massive surge of illegal immigrants once U.S. Code Title 42 expires on May 3.
‘It’s Getting Worse’
Dr. Michael L. Vickers—the owner and president of Las Palmas Veterinary Hospital in Falfurrias, Texas—says he has clients in the cattle business who live in South Texas. In all, he has over 300 ranch accounts in 16 counties along the border.“All of them have been impacted by all of the lawlessness and smuggling that’s been going on at the border,” he told The Epoch Times, “and it’s getting worse.”
He’s a member of the Texas Veterinary Medical Association, the Texas Farm Bureau, and the Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. He’s also chairman of the Texas Border Volunteers, a 300-strong volunteer force that assists the Texas Rangers, local law enforcement, and agents of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol in monitoring over a million acres of private property in counties along the 1,254 miles of continuous Texas/Mexico border.
“They’ve had to build high fences around the compounds where their houses are. A lot have simply left. They’ve moved off to get the hell away from the danger on their property.”
In 2022, a neighbor found 19 bodies on his property, Vickers said. It’s something he’s all too familiar with. He said that three months ago, he found the body of a dead woman just 30 yards from his front door.
The border consists of 28 international bridges, two dams, one hand-drawn ferry, and 25 other crossings for commercial, vehicular, and foot traffic, according to the Texas Department of Transportation.
Ranchers started having real problems in the 1980s, Vickers said. By 2005, things were so bad that the Texas Border Volunteers was born. Since then, the group has identified more than 600 smuggling trails from Laredo to the coast.
“That’s what we do,” he said. “We go out on these drills and wait for the action to show up then we help get them apprehended.” Vickers says his wife pitches in and has a pack of highly trained German Shepherd dogs that help to find and catch illegal immigrants.
A typical operation, Vickers says, consists of sending out scouts to look for signs of foot traffic. They provide the information to Border Patrol agents and assist them in tracking, locating, and apprehending illegal immigrants along the border.
“They don’t have the resources to go out and watch all of these trails. They also provide us with information on where traffic has activated draw bridge cameras.”
Vickers and the Texas Border Volunteers ran the Drawbridge Camera Project as a pilot program years ago. He recalled the time that Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McCraw and Hank Whitman, a retired Marine sergeant, former Texas Ranger, and film producer, accompanied them on patrol.
“They couldn’t believe the amount of traffic that was coming around these checkpoints,” Vickers said. “So they sent us a bunch of glorified game cameras that we put on the trails. These cameras snap pictures and send images to our cell phones and to Border Patrol checkpoints. We got over 900 hits the first week.”
Worse Under Biden
While President Donald Trump was in office, Vickers said traffic dwindled and no large groups were passing through.“After Biden took office, traffic really started escalating,” Vickers said. “We tracked and caught more illegals during our first operation in 2021 under Biden than we did the whole year of 2020 under Trump, and it’s been that way ever since. Where we found 32 dead bodies in Brooks County in 2020, the last year Trump was in office, we found 119 in 2021 under Biden and 91 in 2022. We already have a stack of them for 2023 and it hasn’t even gotten hot yet.”
Vickers noted that they “find less than 20 percent of these bodies. The rest are consumed by wild animals, like wild hogs and mountain lions.”
Vickers said he’s seen mountain lions following the groups. Like lions stalking herds in Africa, the mountain lions follow caravans of people, waiting for the weak or the dying to fall.
‘A Constant Battle’
Whit Jones was born and raised in South Texas. His family has been ranching there since 1890, and while they have dealt with illegal immigrants for over a century, Jones says “the environment of it has changed through the years,” especially during his lifetime.“Whether it’s gun trafficking or human trafficking or people traversing the property,” he said there’s always something to deal with.
However, Jones doesn’t believe that telling his story will make much of a difference, because he has shared his stories “a thousand times and it continues to fall on deaf ears, and it never gets a serious reaction.”
As chairman of the South Texas Property Rights Association, Jones represents a large number of landowners in South Texas, and border security is their biggest concern.
“We work tirelessly to secure our property and our ranches. We’re passing legislation on a state level because it goes nowhere on a national level, and at this point, you have to scratch your head wondering if the energy you spend fighting is going to result in any results, especially with this administration.”
“It’s a constant battle and a handicap in the business,” he said, adding that geographic location dictates how badly the problem affects one person versus someone else, and that this changes as trafficking routes change, along with what the illegal immigrants are trafficking.
“There are parts of south Texas in which you can’t live and raise a family because it’s too dangerous,” he said, adding that when traffic slows down on his property, he knows it isn’t gone. The illegal immigrants are simply moving through to someplace else.
“Dr. Vickers has it worse than me specifically because he’s located closer to an interior checkpoint,” Jones said.
What may be a foreign concept to ranchers in other parts of the United States has become a way of life for those in South Texas.
“You have to be cautious about who you might see on the ranch and cautious of who might walk up while your children are playing outside,” Jones said. “Whatever you can think of, I’ve seen it. Women, children, rape victims, murders. I’ve seen it all.”
While “it would be nice to live in the kind of America the majority get to live in,” Jones says he has little faith that it will ever be resolved, no matter which political party is in office.
‘Not My Problem’
Selene Rodriguez agrees with Jones.Born and raised along the border in Del Rio, Texas, Rodriguez has witnessed firsthand what the Texas ranchers cope with each day. Now living in Austin, she is the assistant director of federal affairs at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Rodriguez believes the lack of solutions to the escalating border crisis is a combination of selective apathy among U.S. citizens and an active effort by the Biden administration and immigration activists to encourage and facilitate illegal immigration.
“It’s a ‘Not my house, not my problem,’ ‘Not my border, not my problem,’ and a ‘Not my state, not my problem,’ problem,” Rodriguez told The Epoch Times.
While Democrats and immigration activists assert that refusing asylum to illegal immigrants is inhumane, Rodriguez disagrees.
“When you adopt policies that say ‘come on over,’ you have millions of people putting their lives and those of their children at the mercy of criminal cartels and coyotes to whom they become indebted for the entire time they are in the United States.”
That proves “there is massive public support for HB 20,” Meckler told The Epoch Times.
U.S. Border Patrol didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
