Mitchell Ferman and Manny Fernandez

Just a few months earlier, a short walk from the spot where Trump stood, two retired Border Patrol agents had set off from the park in their boat. They were testing a new engine in anticipation of a fishing trip. They cracked open some Bud Lights, but the engine died while they were on the water, and on-duty Border Patrol agents, old friends of the guys in the boat, sped out on the river to give them a tow.

There were no migrants apprehended, no heroin seizures. It was just one ordinary, leisurely moment on a border that hums with a continuing stream of migrants — and the easy rhythms of day-to-day life — amid a swirling national controversy over proposals to extend a massive wall along its banks.

The border depicted by the president and the one lived by most McAllen-area residents are two very different places. The collision between the border’s reality and how it is being portrayed for those thousands of miles away came sharply into focus Thursday during Trump’s trip to McAllen, where he met with local, state and federal officials amid protests and counterprotests.

Trump carried his message of border security to a majority-Hispanic city of 142,000 that has been on the front lines of the surge in Central American families coming into the United States.

Preliminary plans are underway to expand some border fencing in parts of the Rio Grande Valley, but McAllen has a well-honed infrastructure to handle migrants, both legal and illegal. Many here have been frustrated that the city has become the symbol of a faraway political debate so entrenched it has shut down parts of the federal government.

“On the one hand, I don’t like my city being portrayed as if there’s a crisis and unrest, when the reality is we’re one of the safest cities in the U.S.,” said Monica Stewart, a longtime resident and small-business owner who has advised lawmakers on border security and international trade issues.

Stewart does not believe the border wall Trump wants to build is necessary, and said there were better ways to improve border security using technology.

McAllen — which was named for the family that settled in the area in the early 1900s — is a largely blue city, with scores of Hispanic Democrats who help run its municipal agencies, courts, schools and businesses. Many of them were critical Thursday of the president’s visit and said they believed he had manufactured a border crisis to sell his plan for a wall.

But McAllen and the larger Rio Grande Valley region are also home to small-but-vocal numbers of Hispanic conservatives. Many are from middle-class Mexican-American families who have lived in the area for generations and do not identify with the Central American migrants fleeing poverty and violence.

Like much else about life on the border, McAllen is never quite what people imagine it to be.

One of the most frequent places to run into Border Patrol agents in McAllen is not on the border itself but at Wingstop or Buffalo Wings &amp; Rings. McAllen has synagogues and country clubs. Its biggest employer is the local school district and community college. Its tallest building is the 17-story Chase Tower, home to real estate developers and Sen. Ted Cruz’s district office.

And its politics are far from predictable.

As the president traveled through town, all he had to do was look out the motorcade’s windows to see a mix of opposition and support for his visit. Parts of the route were lined with protesters who waved signs — “Our home is not a crisis” and “No al muro” (Spanish for “No to the wall”) — and with Trump supporters who had their own signs.

At one moment on the protester side, police officers wrestled at least one person to the ground as tempers flared.

The McAllen police said two people were arrested following a confrontation between Trump supporters and protesters.

Joe Cantu, a 75-year-old Trump backer who wore a red Make America Great Again hat and matching T-shirt, parked at a mall near the airport and was preparing to join a crowd of fellow supporters who gathered to cheer the president’s visit. Some held flags and signs reading “Build the Wall” and “Latinos for Trump.”

“Hell yeah, we need a wall,” said Cantu, a South Texas native who is the former police chief of the nearby town of San Juan.

Trump at one point walked over to dozens of supporters gathered at the airport.

“Oh, I like that,” Trump said when a supporter handed him a military baseball cap with “Trump” emblazoned on the front.

Joaquin Zamora, a city commissioner who was part of a contingent of officials and supporters who greeted Trump at the airport, said he was proud to have the president of the United States visit the city where he was born and raised. But he did not completely support Trump’s plan to build a wall in a region that thrives on binational commerce and trade.

“I think overall it’s not the neighborly thing to do with our neighbors to the south,” said Zamora, 47, who is also a Hidalgo County prosecutor. “You shouldn’t be using immigration to shut down the government to get what you want. Certainly I think there’s other ways to go about it.”

Zamora said he hoped the president’s visit would help dispel, not fuel, misconceptions about the city.

“We’re a wholesome community,” he said. “We’re an American city that’s on the border. What we don’t want is the perception that we’re a dusty border town with burros and carts, AK-47s being fired every 30 minutes and Molotov cocktails being thrown. Because that’s not what’s happening in McAllen.”

The county park adjacent to where Trump got his briefing, known as Anzalduas Park, lies directly along the Rio Grande, and on Thursday, for the presidential visit, it was closed to the public.

City residents said the last time that happened for a presidential visit was in 2006, when President George W. Bush held a news conference there. It is, they said, a place where families go on weekends for barbecues and gatherings, and one of its defining features is that just across the river, on the Mexican side, families fill the banks for their own barbecues and gatherings.

They are so close, united by a river, that they could wave at one another. Sometimes, they do just that.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/10/us/trump-texas-border-visit.html" id="fac32ad1-ef91-305c-a34a-34affd98b274">The New York Times</a>.

In Texas, Trump's Visit Offers Two Views of a Border

McALLEN, Texas — President Donald Trump was briefed near a county park on the Rio Grande on Thursday on the perils of drugs and violence seeping across the Mexican border. But the river he visited has seen its share of both treachery and normalcy.

<h1>McALLEN, Texas — The bodies of what appeared to be a migrant woman in her 20s and three children — two infants and a toddler — were found Sunday night near the edge of the Rio Grande outside the South Texas city of McAllen, authorities said.</h1>

Migrant deaths happen with grim regularity along parts of the United States’ southwestern border, largely when adults and unaccompanied teenagers succumb to harsh desert conditions or a lack of water and die of dehydration, heat stroke or hypothermia. The discovery Sunday was unusual — it is rare for officials to discover dead migrant children on the U.S. side of the border and rarer still for the bodies of three children to be found together.

“Most of the time we usually find either adults or teenagers, but this is the first time we’ve actually found infants and toddlers, and it is pretty shocking for us,” said Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. Guerra, who broke the news of the discovery on Twitter late Sunday night.

Officials said there were as yet no signs of foul play and that the four may have died from dehydration and heat exposure. The bodies appeared to be those of immigrants in the country illegally, but neither their identities nor their country of origin had been determined Monday.

Migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have crossed the border by the thousands in recent months, overwhelming Border Patrol agents, nonprofit groups and local officials.

The four bodies were found by Border Patrol agents across the river from Reynosa, Mexico, in an area on the U.S. side of the border that is heavily traveled by Central American families. They were in a brush-covered region southeast of Anzalduas Park on federal property managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, near the state-run Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area, officials said. The FBI was leading the investigation because the bodies were found on federal land.

“It’s an incredibly heartbreaking situation, which seems to happen far too often,” Special Agent Michelle Lee, a spokeswoman for the FBI in San Antonio, said in a statement.

Early Monday morning, Anzalduas Park was quiet. The only noises were chirping birds and a slight ripple from the river, aside from the occasional Border Patrol truck or county constable vehicle driving by. The park — a 96-acre recreation area with picnic tables, playgrounds and a boat dock that is about 6 miles from downtown McAllen — has been a popular backdrop for visiting officials from Washington. President Donald Trump passed through earlier this year during his only visit to the Texas-Mexico border as president.

The area near the park along the Rio Grande has been a migrant-crossing hub in Hidalgo County. Migrant families with children cross the river here in small or large groups on makeshift rafts and then walk inland in search of Border Patrol agents so they can turn themselves in.

Migrant deaths are more common far north of the river’s edge, on private ranchland deeper into South Texas. In those areas, water is harder to find, the terrain is more isolated and expansive, and migrants often hike for days ill-prepared for the journey.

It was unclear what went wrong for the woman and children whose bodies were found: whether they had gotten lost in the brush in the heat, whether they were already ill when they crossed the river, whether they were abandoned by smugglers or other migrants. Guerra said they were found in a makeshift staging area, a clearing near the river where groups of migrants often gather after they cross the river. From there, they typically walk deeper into the countryside to look for federal agents.

South Texas is always hot in June, but the heat has been extreme in recent days.

On Monday, the National Weather Service issued a “dangerous” heat advisory for the Rio Grande Valley region of South Texas, which includes McAllen. “Heat-related illnesses will likely occur for anyone working or playing outdoors for extended periods of time today,” the advisory said.

Over the past week in the valley, temperatures have regularly approached or exceeded 100 degrees. On Wednesday, the temperature hit 108 degrees.

The Rio Grande Valley is the busiest Border Patrol sector for migrant apprehensions on the nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

In May, a total of 132,887 migrant adults and children were apprehended between ports of entry on the entire southern border, an increase from 99,304 in April, according to Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency. Earlier this month, agents in the Rio Grande Valley sector apprehended more than 4,100 migrants in just three days.

On this stretch of the river, Border Patrol agents have routinely seen children in distress. In April, agents at the Fort Brown station near Brownsville found a 3-year-old boy alone in a cornfield, with his name and a phone number written on his shoes. He was crying but was in good condition. The boy was from Mexico and had been abandoned by smugglers.

One hot afternoon earlier in April, when New York Times journalists accompanied the Border Patrol to a wooded area a few miles from where the four bodies were found Sunday night, a group of nearly 20 migrants from Central America crossed the Rio Grande and turned themselves in to the border agents. The migrants were exhausted and thirsty; some children among them were coughing and had colds and fevers. There were signs on the ground that other children had crossed the border there before them: diapers, children’s T-shirts and an empty infant’s bottle.

The agents walked the migrants along a dirt road to an area where the Border Patrol was processing and transporting other migrants. A 4-year-old girl from Honduras who had a fever held her mother’s hand and struggled to keep up. One of the agents escorting the group, Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Marcelino A. Medina, lifted the girl and carried her in his arms, with her head shielded from the sun beneath a shirt.

“She fell asleep as soon as I picked her up,” Medina said as the girl rested her head on his shoulder. “It’s not ideal temperatures. It’s not ideal humidity for little kids to be walking in.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/us/migrant-border-deaths-texas.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Three Children and a Woman Are Found Dead Along the Border in Texas

Migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have crossed the border by the thousands in recent months, overwhelming Border Patrol agents, nonprofit groups and local officials.

Three children and a woman are found dead along the border in Texas

More than 150 men and women — mostly Hispanic, and including a few couples — turned up Saturday at the Border Patrol’s headquarters in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, looking for a chance to help with the nation’s border security. They talked to recruiters and signed up on iPads, welcomed by pop-country music and two mustang patrol horses.

It was Job Fair day in the busiest Border Patrol sector in the United States.

The Border Patrol and its parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, have come in for widespread criticism for implementing some of President Donald Trump’s harshest immigration policies: curtailing the number of asylum-seekers processed each day at the border and, in 2018, separating families. But that is not the dominant local narrative.

Working in the Border Patrol has been a bedrock middle-class job for generations of Mexican-American families, much the way police departments served as a gateway to a respectable future for generations of immigrants in the Northeast.

“It’s basically the go-to job in the valley,” said Andrew Canales, 22, who was born and raised in the region.

“It pays well,” said his girlfriend, Savannah Reyna, 19.

Since taking office, Trump has sought to harden the southern border with more fencing and more law enforcement. The president signed an executive order calling for the hiring of 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, but the agency has had serious problems recruiting and retaining agents, especially on remote sections of the 1,900-mile border with Mexico.

The hiring process can take nearly a year, slowed by lengthy background checks and polygraph examinations that prompt many applicants to look elsewhere.

The Border Patrol has about 19,500 agents, some 1,800 fewer than Congress has provided funds for. Though the agency lost almost twice as many agents in recent years as it hired, it managed to achieve a net increase of 118 agents in the latest fiscal year.

Those figures are still far from Trump’s goals. So the Border Patrol has beefed up recruiting efforts across the country, and perhaps nowhere more than in South Texas, where it has been conducting a broad marketing campaign.

Hiring advertisements appear on Instagram and Twitter, and the agency has invested heavily in cultivating relationships. This past week, at a “Head of the Class” ceremony at a local performing arts center, the agency honored high school seniors who “demonstrate exemplary character and determination to succeed.” It was not a recruiting event, and many of the students were not planning to pursue law-enforcement careers. But the Border Patrol was signaling its role as a member of the larger valley community, much the way local grocery-store chains and banks do.

Earlier this year, the newly arrived sector chief for the Rio Grande Valley, Rodolfo Karisch, held a “State of the Border” presentation and meet-and-greet to update lawmakers and the public about the agency’s efforts.

The Rio Grande Valley remains at the leading edge of unauthorized border crossings in the United States, with more than 78,900 members of families and 42,300 single adults apprehended since Oct. 1.

In the valley, where the average household income is just $37,000, the federal border agency has become an important driver of an economy that also depends heavily on trade with Mexico, along with agriculture and tourism.

“If you have 3,000 Border Patrol agents here in South Texas, you’re going to have at least 2,500 homes purchased, and probably 5,000 vehicles,” said Rick Cavazos, a retired Border Patrol agent who is now the mayor of the border town of Los Indios, Texas. “Kids are in schools. Some of these government jobs are six-figure jobs. Economically, those are some of the things that I wish people would look at.”

The agency has been a source of opportunity for Mexican-Americans in particular. A little more than half of all Border Patrol agents are Hispanic, and in the Rio Grande Valley, the proportion is even higher, agency officials say.

More than 150 men and women visited the Border Patrol’s Valley headquarters in just five hours on Saturday. Not all applied for jobs, but many did — despite a week of upheaval in Washington, where the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Border Patrol, has lost its Cabinet secretary and several other top officials to firings and resignations.

One notable departure was Ronald Vitiello, who more than a decade ago was the chief patrol agent in the Rio Grande Valley sector. Trump withdrew Vitiello’s nomination to be director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is responsible for immigration enforcement away from the border. Trump said he wanted to go in a “tougher” direction.

The robust turnout Saturday appeared to be a sign that the Border Patrol has stable support in the largely Democratic front-line communities most affected by a recent surge in migration from Central America, even though the agency’s stepped-up security response has drawn criticism around the country and in some quarters locally as well.

Tucked between a minor league basketball arena and a Buick-GMC car dealership, the agency’s headquarters saw a stream of applicants throughout the day.

Michael Giambra, a slight Venezuelan-born 19-year-old who lives in Edinburg, said he made $8 an hour running the drive-through window at Whataburger — or Whisky Bravo, as many agents call it. A veteran recruiter for the agency, Maria Guerrero, frequents the fast-food joint and had been chatting with Giambra for months. During her late-evening dinner run Friday, she invited him to the job fair, and to her surprise, he showed up the next morning.

“I know that Border Patrol before was a really high standard — it was a good job, people that secure our country,” Giambra said after submitting his application. “Now it’s been beaten up for the same reason. Because of politics.”

Guerrero, who apparently had recruited several of the people who applied Saturday, said that interest in joining the agency had heightened lately. But she said she was unsure whether the trend was a response to the polarizing politics surrounding the border and immigration.

Jason Castro, 19, said that his mother encouraged him to attend the job fair after she saw Guerrero’s recruitment post on Facebook. Castro, who works in retail at Old Navy, said many of his relatives have worked in law enforcement and that he wanted to do the same.

He might have found it uncomfortable to talk about joining the Border Patrol with some of his left-leaning friends in South Texas, a region that votes firmly for Democrats. “But everyone’s supportive, a couple friends texted me ‘good luck’ earlier, and that kind of stuff,” he said. “And not all my friends even like the Border Patrol.”

Guerrero helped guide Castro through his application, handing him the appropriate documents and introducing him to other agents. As he left, she hugged him and planted a kiss on his cheek, a common greeting in South Texas.

Morale across the agency has taken a nose-dive the past several months, agents have said, complaining about a lack of resources to handle large numbers of migrants and the instability of the agency’s leadership in Washington.

“A lot of guys feel they get beat up in the public,” said Christopher Cabrera, vice president of the local union of Border Patrol agents in the valley. “They worry about what’s being said about them. I think most guys, they just kind of brush it off. I think the families of our agents feel beaten up, because people are attacking their loved ones.”

Adrian Garza, a McAllen native who showed up at the job fair wearing a black suit, said he had served in the National Guard for the past four years and had always wanted to work in law enforcement.

“I wouldn’t want anything other than this,” Garza said.

The steps to receiving a badge and taking an oath can often take months, and sometimes nearly a year, including a long period at the Border Patrol Academy in New Mexico. Then there are exams and further training in the field along the border. Giambra said he believes he can pass — with the right studying.

Giambra admits that he does not understand the nuances of asylum law, as the Border Patrol’s workload changes from arresting and deporting people who enter the country illegally to dealing with the growing number of migrants arriving to seek protection from persecution in their homelands.

“I’m not 100 percent sure on that,” Giambra said when discussing the growing number of asylum cases. “I want to study the laws, but I don’t know right now.”

Of the post-academy tests, one recruiter said, the one that prospective agents often struggle with the most is the immigration law exam. But Giambra figures that he has time to master that, too. In any case, for a job with a future, he is ready to try.

“You’re working for the federal government,” he said. “You’re not working for, like, Whataburger.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="eece6273-d427-352c-a8dc-c3bc87ed9afb" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/us/border-patrol-recruit-texas.html">The New York Times</a>.

In South Texas, Path to Middle Class Starts With Border Job

EDINBURG, Tex. — They showed up in dress shoes and button downs, cowboy boots and bluejeans, flip-flops and khaki shorts. Some worked in retail, others in food service, and several had served in the military.

In South Texas, path to middle class starts with border job

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Mitchell Ferman and Manny Fernandez

Articles written by the author

In Texas, Trump's Visit Offers Two Views of a Border

Three children and a woman are found dead along the border in Texas

In South Texas, path to middle class starts with border job