Residents of Texas border town pass on promised wall

EAGLE PASS, Texas — Unlikely as it seems in a deep-red state where immigration is a red-hot issue, there’s at least one Texas city where you can talk all day without finding a fan of building a taller, sturdier border wall.

In Eagle Pass, where a pair of enormous Mexican flags fly just across two international bridges, and where armed U.S. Border Patrol agents ply the shallow Rio Grande in airboats, there’s virtually no visible support for a wall, at least in casual conversation at cafes, churches and coffee klatches.

“If people want to come to America, they’ll find a way,” said Rodolfo Musquiz, 51, a school administrator who works with migrant youth. “We need security, but not a wall.”

At best, folks around this city about about 140 miles southwest of San Antonio consider the proposal – a touchstone symbol of immigration control, advanced by at least two Republican presidential campaigns — a costly political gesture.

But, then, the politics of Eagle Pass are unusual for Texas.

A population of 28,000 is about 97 percent Hispanic or Latino — living a matter of yards from a Mexican city of 139,000.

“It’s politically weird down here,” said Lowell McManus, chairman of the Maverick County Republican Party, who attributes opposition to a border wall to local Democratic Party loyalty and “low-information” voters.

“We don’t get any television from the United States,” he said, noting that airwaves are filled with stations across the border, in Piedras Negras, Mexico.

“They only cover the elections from the Mexican perspective,” he said of the U.S. Republican and Democratic primaries.

The Mexican border, and two bridges crossing it, are the most significant landmarks in Eagle Pass.

Cars, trucks and buses cross the Rio Grande here, and it is one of few crossing points for trains, according to the city’s website.

The border stations see about a half-million people cross into the United States in a given month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Others still cross illegally.

Agents patrolling a 210-square mile area that includes Eagle Pass arrested 3,282 undocumented immigrants in the last three months of 2015, according to Dennis Smith, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Even with that many illegal crossings, a proposal by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to build “a wall that works” — or rival candidate Donald Trump’s call for a wall at least 30 feet tall along more than 1,000 miles of the U.S./Mexican border, at an estimated cost of $8 billion — don’t find much traction.

“Look at the Berlin Wall. Look at the Great Wall of China,” said Moises Pena, a retired police lieutenant who was who lunching on tacos with his eighth-grade sons at the Border Cafe on Tuesday. “It still didn’t keep people out.”

Not that Texans discount the need for border security.

Cruz won 39 percent of Texas GOP primary voters on Super Tuesday, and Trump won 33 percent. McManus said there aren’t many local Republicans who would oppose more security along the border, whether that means more cameras or a wall. 

It’s a view held by Republicans nationally, according to the Pew Research Center, which found 73 percent support for a proposal to build a border wall in a September 2015 survey.

Underscoring Texas’ commitment to border security is $800 million spent by the Legislature last year to put troopers, boats and cameras along the Rio Grande. Lawmakers didn’t believe the federal government was doing enough to protect the border. 

But political opinions change the closer one gets to the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. Four years ago 79 percent of Maverick County’s voters cast ballots for President Barack Obama.

Catalina Dequey, 50, who was born in Eagle Pass and was in town to visit relatives this week, said a border wall is “dumb.”

“It’s a waste of money,” she said over coffee at a local motel. “They’re still going to manage to come over.

Dequey said she’s talked to undocumented border-crossers from Central America, including one man whose foot was mutilated when he jumped onto a train headed to the U.S. border.

“I ask, ‘Why are you here?’” she said. “They’re like, ‘In our country, the soldiers come in with no permission.’ They go through hell. One of them told me the United States was a dream.”

The Rev. Wes Cain, 28, visiting Eagle Pass with a Methodist volunteer group from Boerne, Texas, to rehab local houses, said a border wall challenges his faith.

“It is extremely against my beliefs as a Christian,” he said. “Jesus Christ was about breaking down walls and barriers.

A wall to replace the long fence that runs through town — occasionally interrupted by gates — would probably stop those “who could use our help,” he added.

To Musquiz, the school administrator, tension between security and compassion is an old one.

“We grew up here,” he said while standing on a bluff where his grandparents built a house that overlooked the Rio Grande and Mexico in 1901.

Musquiz said the sight of people crossing the river isn’t new.

“But we never went through any robberies,” he noted. “They’re just looking for work. They’re pretty desperate.”

Musquiz, like everyone, wants a secure border.

But, as for the threat from Mexico or the need for a wall?

“It’s not like we’re at war,” he said.

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Contact him at jaustin@cnhi.com.