Someone Orchestrated the Border Crisis
September 22, 2021 • The Homestead: Keeping Texas Texan
https://thecannononline.com/someone-orch...nel=tw-27702749
Joshua Trevino

Joshua S. Treviño is the Chief Innovation Officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, in which he explores pathways for future Foundation action and develops forecasts for Texas and the nation. Prior to his service as CIO, he was Vice President for Strategy at the Illinois Policy Institute in Chicago. Prior to that, he was Vice President for Communications at the Texas Public Policy Foundation for six years. His other experience includes service as Vice President for Policy at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, independent media consultancy, consultancy at Booz Allen Hamilton, service as both a speechwriter and an international-health professional in the Administration of George W. Bush, and service as a United States Army officer. He lives in the Austin, Texas, region with his wife and two sons.

You can see a long way from Border Patrol Hill. A clear day and good pair of binoculars get you visibility for twenty, thirty, sometimes forty miles into Mexico. It’s view broken only by the rolling terrain on both sides of the Amistad reservoir. This used to be a barren and canyon-strewn section of the near despoblado: now it’s a “recreation area,” a dammed lake with recreation mostly on the north side. On the south side, it’s all business. The business is trafficking: drugs, people, lawlessness, the common coin of Mexico hellbound for Texas.

I stood on Border Patrol Hill at sunset, binoculars in hand, and surveyed the far shore. The low red sun was ideal for illuminating glass and metal at a distance: I could see the glints and flashes as the vehicles moved down from the approach roads onto the sandy shoreline. Nearly the whole apparatus of transport was visible from here, at this hour, when it was bright enough to see but dim enough that prudent drivers turned on their headlights. Carretera Federal 2, the cartel-controlled Mexican route hugging the border from Matamoros to just west of Ciudad Acuña, brought the main traffic — and then the vehicles bearing their cargo and people pulled off onto the tributary roads, descending momentarily out of sight before popping up again on the bluffs above the shoreline.

As the sun set, the traffic grew.

They came to the shoreline, and most of them parked, and waited. No families emerged to frolic in the reservoir waters — and would they here, after dark, or ever? — but groups of men did exit their vehicles. They stood, and they waited. On a handful of occasions, the men would be discharged, and the vehicle would leave. This was the exception: for the majority, it seemed as if there was something in the trucks, or vans, that was worth keeping near at hand.

On the near shore, I spotted an overturned hull: an abandoned boat from a past run.

Sweeping the view from east to west, I counted each Mexican-shoreline vehicle. I stopped at thirty. There were more. There were a lot. Assume two to three men per vehicle — which seemed about right based upon the numbers emerging from each — and there were perhaps a hundred, maybe more or less, on the opposite shore. Waiting. Waiting — and looking at me, silhouetted against the setting sun on the far shore, just as I looked at them.-- excerpt, rest at link above --