STATE OF SIEGE
“THIS PARTICULAR EMPLOYEE HAS BEEN PULLED OVER THREE TIMES IN SEVEN DAYS. SO I THINK IT WOULD BE EASY TO SAY HE IS BEING TARGETED FOR HARASSMENT.”
On a Friday morning, two days before Christmas 2016, Marianna Treviño-Wright decided she’d had enough of the Texas Department of Public Safety’s latest “border surge.” The longtime executive director of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Treviño-Wright sat down at her desk, next to the baby turtle terrarium and the butterfly kites, to write an angry email to the local DPS captain. “My employees are being repeatedly stopped for a variety of reasons,” she wrote. “They are being questioned in the morning, when arriving at work and opening the gate. … They are being pulled over on Military [Highway] and on Schuerbach [Road] and asked, ‘What are you doing out here?’”
It was an incident the day before that finally pushed her over the edge. That morning, a DPS trooper had pulled over her groundskeeper in the center’s parking lot and demanded to see the man’s driver’s license. In the past, she and her staff had tried to laugh it off, making sarcastic jokes with one another about how one Mexican looked just like the next to DPS, but now it was getting ridiculous. The trooper said he’d stopped the groundskeeper because of a faulty taillight. But the taillight worked just fine. “This particular employee has been pulled over three times in seven days,” she wrote. “So I think it would be easy to assert he is being targeted for harassment.”
The National Butterfly Center sprawls across 100 acres, bordering the Rio Grande in Hidalgo County. The land sits on the migration route for the threatened monarch and dozens of other species that pass through the area every fall on their way to Mexico. For more than a decade, the center has also been inside the zone of one DPS border security operation after another, as state leaders have converted the state police agency into Texas’ own Department of Homeland Security. Once devoted primarily to enforcing statewide traffic laws and conducting criminal investigations, over the past decade DPS has received billions in taxpayer dollars to invest in special-ops teams, armored gunboats, spy planes and other military equipment to patrol the Texas-Mexico border.
The federal government already runs a multibillion-dollar border security operation that has grown over that same time period to include new fences and walls, thousands of additional border agents, surveillance towers, ground sensors and drones. Despite the federal buildup, Governor Rick Perry, facing a competitive re-election campaign in 2006, refashioned himself as a tough-on-the-border candidate, promising to line the Rio Grande with surveillance cameras so that ordinary citizens serving as “virtual Texas deputies” could report the smuggling of people and drugs in real time on the web. After winning the election, Perry doled out $4 million in federal funds to his Texas Virtual Border Watch program. (The Texas Tribune later reported that only 29 cameras had been installed by 2010, netting just 26 arrests at a whopping cost of $153,800 each.) Despite criticism in the media and from Democrats, Perry embraced his border-hawk role, depicting the borderlands as a war zone in need of a tough-talking governor to hold back the chaos and the cartels. That strategy helped Perry build his national profile for his first bid for the White House in 2012.
In 2014, an influx of Central American children and families began arriving at the Texas border requesting asylum, the majority of them coming through Hidalgo and neighboring Starr County, the U.S. counties closest to Central America. As their arrival attracted international attention, Perry launched Operation Strong Safety, deploying 1,000 National Guard soldiers and hundreds of DPS troopers to the border. State troopers, he said, would work on a “round the clock basis” to disrupt “drug and human trafficking and other border-related crimes.” At a press conference at the Capitol, Perry proclaimed, “There can be no national security without border security, and Texans have paid too high a price for the federal government’s failure to secure our border.”
Standing at a podium in front of a two-star general from the Texas National Guard and DPS Director Steve McCraw, Perry said he would “not stand idly by while our citizens are under assault.” When a reporter at the press conference pointed out that elected officials from the border disagreed with his depiction of their communities as unsafe, Perry scoffed at him.
In fact, Texas’ border counties have had some of the
