EAGLE PASS, Texas — Juanita Martinez walked up to the closed gate of Shelby Park Tuesday afternoon and started an argument with a Texas National Guard member. The park was closed to the public, the young soldier said, for “safety and security.”
“Safety from what?” Martinez replied.
Martinez, the chair of the Maverick County Democratic Party, is one of many locals angry that their town has become the main stage in a national political drama. In December, record numbers of migrants crossed the Rio Grande, tens of thousands of them through Shelby Park, a 47-acre expanse of grass and ballfields on the banks of the river. In response, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered his forces to take over the park, mainly to deny access to the Border Patrol, which had previously used the park to process arriving migrants. But that also closed the park to the public.
Now Abbott is planning to use the park for yet another political purpose: He’s scheduled to hold a news conference on Sunday with 14 other governors who’ve backed him in his standoff with the federal government, including Georgia’s Brian Kemp and Iowa’s Kim Reynolds.
In Martinez’s view, Abbott’s border security measures — the troops, the barbed wire, the shipping containers, the buoys in the river — have done nothing to deter migrants, and December’s record crossings are the proof.
“It’s a big scam, it’s political propaganda,” she said. “What is our message to Abbott? Get the hell out of Maverick County and get the hell out of our park. We don’t need you here.”
Local officials in Eagle Pass have been overwhelmed on two fronts: the rising number of migrants and the state’s response to those migrants. Abbott and other Republicans maintain that migration at the border constitutes an “invasion.”
One city official, who asked not to be named because he had not been cleared to speak with the media, said the forces brought in by the governor — National Guard troops, officers with the Texas…
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