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EAGLE PASS, TX – Abdoul, a 32-year-old West African, made an unexpected detour before settling in New York City like thousands of other migrants this year: After crossing the US-Mexico border, he spent weeks in a rural Texas prison on local trespassing charges.
“I spent a lot of hours without sleeping, sitting on the floor,” Abdoul, a political activist who fled Mauritania fearing persecution, explained. He agreed to speak on the condition that his last name not be published for fear of damaging his refugee application.
Beginning in March, Texas will authorize police to arrest illegal immigrants and give local judges the ability to order them deported. Two years ago, Texas initiated a smaller-scale campaign to arrest migrants for trespassing. However, there is little evidence that that effort was successful in stopping illicit crossings.
The findings raise concerns about the impact of arrests on discouraging immigration as Texas prepares to give police even more authority to capture migrants on charges of unlawful entry. Civil rights groups have already filed a lawsuit to overturn the new law signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, claiming it is an unlawful overreach that infringes on the US government’s immigration jurisdiction.
Since 2021, Texas authorities have arrested nearly 10,000 migrants on misdemeanor trespassing charges as part of Abbott’s “arrest and jail” operation, in which border landowners enter into agreements with the state authorizing trespassing arrests, allowing law enforcement to apprehend migrants who enter the US through those properties.
The arrests have sparked constitutional challenges, including accusations of due process breaches, in the courts. Recently, one owner requested that the trespassing arrests on their property be halted, saying that authorities never had the authority to begin with.
Abbott believed that the trespassing arrests would have quick results. “When people start learning about this, they’re going to stop coming across the Texas border,” he said to Fox News in July 2021, when Texas-Mexico border crossings hit 1.2 million that fiscal year.
This figure has risen even higher in the last fiscal year, surpassing 1.5 million.
“They’re still coming through here,” said Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber, where Abdoul crossed the border and was immediately apprehended in July.
Texas may soon phase out trespassing arrests, according to Abbott, as it goes forward with unlawful entrance charges that may be enforced almost anywhere in the state, including hundreds of miles from the border.
The trespassing arrests have been a key component of Abbott’s roughly $10 billion border effort, Operation Lone Star, which has put the federal government’s power over immigration to the test. Abbott has also bused an estimated 80,000 migrants to Democratic-led cities, erected razor wire along the border, and built buoy barriers in the Rio Grande. Abbott escalated his busing operation last week by sending a flight of 120 migrants to Chicago.
The mission is obvious in Maverick County, where several arrests have occurred. Patrol vehicles are stationed every few miles along the two-lane highways heading to Eagle Pass, Texas. State troopers from Florida, one of many GOP-led states that have dispatched National Guard personnel and law enforcement to the border, operate alongside Texas officials along the Rio Grande.
Abdoul was apprehended in Shelby Park, a little patch of greenery beside the river with a boat ramp. Abdoul arrived in America for the first time on the Fourth of July. Officers standing nearby questioned him briefly before taking him into arrest.
He said that in jail, he was given little food amounts and was so miserable that he would say anything to get out. He pled guilty to trespassing, which carries a maximum term of a year in prison.
It’s unclear how many of those caught at the border for trespassing are still in the country, have been deported, have been permitted to stay to seek asylum, or have had their cases dismissed. However, Kristen Etter, an attorney who claims her legal group has defended over 3,000 migrants accused of trespassing, claims that the vast majority of their clients were permitted to stay and seek asylum.
She claims that many migrants seek out law authorities near the border to surrender.
“If anything, rather than being a deterrent, it is attracting more people,” she went on to say.
The Texas Department of Public Safety is leading the trespassing arrests, and the state’s border operation has resulted in more than 37,000 overall criminal arrests. Officers have stopped gang members, human traffickers, sex offenders, and others from entering the nation, according to spokeswoman Ericka Miller.
“Had we not been there, all of it would have likely crossed into the country unimpeded,” Miller wrote in an email. “The state of Texas is working to send a message to those considering crossing into the country illegally to think again.”
During a rise in migrant crossings in July, Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas signed a blanket trespassing charge affidavit to allow arrests like Abdoul’s on park grounds. He revoked the affidavit after receiving local opposition, only to sign it again weeks later. Salinas ultimately supports the operation since it has delivered much-needed law enforcement officers to the city.
“Our force is not big enough to maintain the peace of Eagle Pass if we have 10-15,000 people coming through,” he added.
State Rep. David Spiller, who wrote the new arrest statute passed by Abbott this month, believes that without the trespassing convictions, border crossings would be far higher. However, he claims that these cases add to prosecutors’ workloads, rely on landowner cooperation, and, even if defendants are convicted, the offense is not deportable under federal law.
Those charged, according to Spiller, are likely integrating into the American populace.
“We’re doing what we can, but we’re only slowing down that process,” Spiller told reporters. “We haven’t stopped anybody.”
After his release, Abdoul flew to New York City, where he claimed he was permitted to remain at a shelter for a month. He currently shares a room with a cousin while waiting for a work visa. He plans to seek a job and attend school until an immigration judge decides his fate next spring.
“When everything is finished and my case is guaranteed, I want to go to school because I started school and my dream is to be well educated,” Abdoul said in a statement.
(Ted Shaffrey, an Associated Press video journalist, contributed reporting from New York.)
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