In Eagle Pass, the border crisis is complicated
Living and working less than 2 miles from the Rio Grande, Margil Lopez is at the heart of the United States’ migrant crisis. Yet it took a trip to the hospital, after his father threw his back out, for him to grasp the scale of the crisis in the small town of Eagle Pass, Texas.
“It took us five hours to even see the doctor,” he says.
For over a year, this rural sector of the southern border has seen more migrant crossings than almost any other. The Biden administration has been responding with a combination of carrots and sticks, from creating new legal pathways for certain migrants to continuing a policy of rapidly expelling certain other migrants. But the state of Texas has been responding here as well, and with much more aggression.
In an unprecedented venture into immigration enforcement by a state government, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, launched Operation Lone Star in 2021. The $4.4 billion border security initiative has seen state police and National Guard members – reinforced by National Guard units from other Republican-led states
