The Texas Border Surge Is Backfiring
When US citizens lose confidence in our law enforcers, we have done the real criminals a huge favor to our own detriment.
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Not long before the Manzanares incident, state troopers shot two unarmed immigrants to death while sniping at them from a helicopter during a chase. The details of this incident were relayed to the public not by the Department of Public Safety, but by a news story.
And while these examples represent the extreme, residents in the Rio Grande Valley suffer daily indignities at the hands of state troopers who routinely engage in racial profiling that they fail to accurately report.
In short, neither DPS nor the Border Patrol is trusted by the community. The perceived collaboration between local police, state troopers, and the Border Patrol makes any resident with a lick of common sense hesitant about calling the police. And it is this hesitancy that makes our communities unsafe — no one wants stash houses or potentially dangerous activity near our families, but the threat of state-mandated “boots on the ground” puts us between a rock and a hard place.
Immigration enforcement and local policing responsibilities are quite different. The federal government spends a huge amount of resources training its agents. While I continue to have trouble with the lack of accountability by the Border Patrol, I am very uncomfortable with the notion that a local police officer would be expected to know and enforce immigration law.