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Chaos in God's
Country
The men defending our southern border are overwhelmed.

National Guard agents monitor the banks of the Rio Grande on the border between El Paso, Texas state,
United States, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state, Mexico, on December 28, 2022.(Photo by HERIKA
MARTINEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Collin Pruett
Feb 13, 2023 12:05 AM

I n Hondo, Texas, they have a warning to drivers: “This is God’s

country, please don't drive like Hell.”

I read the sign the first time I drove through Hondo, on my way to
Brackettville. Tucked away from Austin and San Antonio in the
Texas Hill Country, Hondo does feel like God’s country.
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I passed through town on Highway 90. I was sure to watch my

speed. A few more towns followed. A dimly lit grain tower on the left
of the byway, a Dairy Queen on the right. Stretches of black and the
unwelcome passing headlights of an F-150.

This is small town America. It is beset with challenges. There are

empty storefronts. Old tires are stacked up in front of a brick gas
station, still adorned with defunct gas pumps from a bygone era. The
street lights are dim, if they work at all. But the people of Southwest
Texas remain, despite their challenges, just beyond the reach of the
unyielding urbanization gripping their state. In that, there is peace
and pride.

Their homes, however, like so many others on America’s border with

Mexico, are in danger of being lost in the spiraling border crisis.

I caught the glow of Uvalde, Texas, sometime around 10 p.m. I

pulled up to the first stop light in town; billboards read “Uvalde
Strong.” The town is still reeling from the heinous school shooting
they endured last May. Just below a sign, eight Border Patrol squad
trucks lined the highway, accompanied by one ICE van. Officers
were patting down a suspect pressed against the van while others
searched trash bags, presumably filled with narcotics.

In Uvalde, contrasts were plain. My hotel was a mile further up the

road. A Border Patrol truck was parked at a Wendy’s. I hung a right
off the highway. I passed a dusty garage filled with Border Patrol
trucks, surplus Humvees, and some old Jeeps. I pulled into my hotel,
checked in, and parked, next to twelve squad cars from the Texas
Department of Public Safety. They were sent by Texas Governor
Greg Abbott to protect the town. The state has put them up long-
term at the Days Inn & Suites, there to keep Uvalde from being
overrun by traffickers.

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I took my golf clubs out of my car, put them in my room, and went
to see if there were any public safety officers in the hotel lobby bar.
It was a Texas type of place, replete with portraits of the Republic’s
Founding Fathers, neon Shiner Beer signs, and pool tables. I didn’t
find any off-duty officers, but a local pub denizen introduced
himself. He managed a motel in Camp Campos and was eager to
detail the local art scene and his planning for crowds coming to
Southwest Texas to see next year’s lunar eclipse. This, and his
shoulder-length hair, caused me to suspect he was a guy who liked to
hang out in Marfa. Of course, it turned out he had business there.

He asked me why I was in Uvalde and I told him I was meeting with
sheriffs the next day to take a look at the border. He reassured me,
“The sheriff's deputies here are great. When I started remodeling
our motel they helped me expel a meth-trafficking ring from room
fifteen in no time.” Our bartender cracked a Lone Star and shook his
head: “There are twelve DPS agents at this hotel, something like fifty
different agents of sorts assigned to our town, and we still have
three high-speed chases a week seems like.” I recalled the sign in
Hondo. It wasn’t a warning, it was a plea.

During the next morning’s drive to Bracketville I counted nine squad

cars, excluding those at Border Patrol’s checkpoint on Highway 90. I
pulled into the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office and sat down with
Sheriff Brad Coe.

Sheriff Coe strikes you as the type of man you want defending your
town. A spitting image of Teddy Roosevelt or a modern-day Wyatt
Earp, Sheriff Coe spent three decades as a Border Patrol agent
before retiring and running for sheriff in Kinney County. He detailed
the plight of Kinney County in stark terms, noting that the current
iteration of the border crisis is the worst period of his career: "In all
my years, I’ve never seen it this bad."

He told me that Kinney County was outfunded and outmanned:

Let me put it this way. My budget for the office is $1.5

million. When I first took office it was $900,000. We can’t
sustain that increase every year. When the cartels can
afford to put up their own cell towers and phone system,
they’re doing pretty damn good... And the Mexican
government doesn’t care, they’re practically joined at the
hip.

Despite the odds, Coe told me that his deputies are the best men
he’s led during his career: “It’s six days a week, thirteen hour shifts. I
have to say, the six full-timers, in all my years in law enforcement
these six are some of the most dedicated and willing to do their job.
They don’t complain much. They never complain about the little
things… They’re like brothers and sisters. They’re all young, under
the age of thirty-five… I couldn’t ask for a finer set of officers”

Coe described a county overrun by trafficking. With a sixteen mile

shared border with Mexico and over a thousand square miles of
open country, Kinney County is primarily a human smuggling route.
But is also used to traffic just about anything Customs prohibits. The
sheriff has apprehended everything from fentanyl to fully automatic
firearms and, recently, eggs. He described highly capable cartels that
maintained intricate trafficking networks in every major city in the
U.S.

I asked him if he believed the cartels could be accurately described

as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. He didn’t hesitate: “Well they
are. When they’re pushing their ideology, pushing the dope, and
pushing the people, they’re a terrorist organization. There’s a statue
of Santa Muerte they walk by every day and pay homage to.”

He scrolled through footage from game cameras his officers had

placed all over the county. The footage captured dozens of
traffickers and migrants, all caught on camera in the hours before I
arrived to interview him.

Coe walked through his spreadsheet estimating the number of illegal

migrants law enforcement was unable to apprehend: “The gotaways
are just an abstract number. We’ve got twenty here, a dozen there,
but how many didn’t we see? On camera, we’re picking up stuff
every night. So far this year, on camera, we’ve got 4,600 aliens that
have not been caught. We’re averaging about 160 a day.”

For a county of 3,100 people, the numbers were overwhelming. At

any given moment, the population of migrants trespassing through
the county could outnumber the number of citizens. The sheriff was
clear-eyed in his assessment of the economy fueling the lawlessness
in his county:

When we interviewed a female sometime back, she was a

little distraught. She owed the cartels $5,000 for being
smuggled to the border. There’s another $3,000 to be
smuggled to another location. She was gonna be smuggled
further east, but that was gonna cost her another $5,000.
So, she didn’t have two nickels to her name. She owes $10-
15,000 dollars. So what do they do? Indentured slavery,
you’re gonna work on this farm or for this rancher for the
next ten to fifteen years until the cartel is paid back.

He recounted the damages the modern slave trade brought his

town:

Our hunters didn’t come back because of what’s going on.

Fortunately the Galveston troopers bring some revenue
because they eat and use gas. But if the troopers go away
and the hunters don’t come back… that’s all this country
has, the hunters. We do have some agriculture but the
hunts are what brings the money in. If it wasn’t for the
troopers filling up gasoline three or four times a day, we’d
be in hurting status. That’s part of the reason I’m fightin’
so hard.

Describing frequent high speed chases, he continued, “It’s to the

point where I’ve had two this month, two this weekend. Used to the
officers would call me with a lot of adrenaline when we had chases.
Now they just sigh. They’re getting too accustomed to it. That’s
what worries me more than anything.”

Kinney County has been abandoned by the federal government, and

Sheriff Coe knows it. He left me with a list of immediate needs from
other counties and states:

A) Put all the prayer out there that you can. I’m a big
believer in the power of prayer. Moral support, with
legislation, stand up with us. B) Send us all the support you
can. I know budgets are tight and things are expensive, but
we’ll put officers up at reduced rates or a lot of the time
even for free. If they can send interdiction teams, we know
there are westbound shipments that we don’t have the
capacity to stop.

Two counties, so far, have heeded the sheriff’s call for

reinforcement. Operating under Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation
Lone Star, Goliad County has stationed three officers in
Brackettville. Galveston County, victimized by the second-most
fentanyl overdoses in the state, sent six.

I walked out of Sheriff Coe's office with Constable Justin West from
Galveston County. “Anytime Galveston County is hit by hurricanes,
the State of Texas responds. We’re here to help those who help us,”
he said. Constable West is a meat-and-potatoes law enforcement
officer. The constable has a mission to do on the border, and my
inclination is he’s going to damn well do it.

During my forty-five-minute conversation with the sheriff, Kinney

County deputies apprehended three vehicles full of migrants. Three
traffickers sat in handcuffs in the lobby. One of the traffickers, a
young woman with snakebite piercings, struggled to hold back tears.
She looked like the kind of girl you’d find in any college town’s
coffee shop. But in Southwest Texas, lines are blurred. Anyone can
become a criminal.

Before a routine patrol, we sat in an old ranch home built in 1894.

Locals were allowing Galveston’s police to stay there free of charge.
Constable West told me that despite Galveston County’s population
being 100 times larger than Kinney County’s, Kinney County
experienced more crime. Before Galveston’s police arrived, service
calls from Kinney County’s residents were up 600 percent.

We drove out to Kinney County’s backroads, checking for migrants

along a railroad track. Trash lined the county’s dirt roads. Water
bottles, trash bags, sleeping bags, and train schedules were littered
everywhere I looked. The constable explained that the large
cylinders under the tracks provided shelter for the smugglers to
shield their victims from the elements. At one point, Galveston
County police were apprehending nearly fifty or sixty migrants a day
on the tracks.

West beckoned towards a rancher’s cut fencing, adorned with survey

tape. The tape was placed there by coyotes to help traffickers guide
their victims through the countryside. He told me that the cartels
usually use color-coded arm bands to track their victims, but
recently he had started seeing migrants who had been tattooed with
barcodes. For those who know their history, the imagery that detail
conjures is discomforting. For the multi-billion dollar slave trade,
arm bands just aren’t efficient enough.

I stopped at Ziggy’s Roadside BBQ before leaving Brackettville. The

brisket was good, and I enjoyed it while listening to the owner detail
an encounter with a migrant who had rummaged through his golf
cart that morning while Sheriff Coe’s deputies took notes.

Everywhere I stopped seemed touched by crime. In a community

once defended from Mexico’s lawlessness by Fort Clark, American
citizens are subjected to daily indignities and danger. In
Brackettville, Texas you meet the real forgotten Americans.

I pulled into Del Rio, Texas, about an hour and a half later. Del Rio
was overrun by migrant caravans in 2021, producing some of the
most shocking images of the crisis.

Policy makers federally and in the state seemed to respond to the

pictures, apparently embarrassed by the spectacle their neglect had
created. Unlike Brackettville, Del Rio was fortified. Humvees lined
steel fencing at Del Rio’s port of entry overlooking Ciudad Acuña.
Startled by my self-guided tour of their post, two National
Guardsmen woke up and jumped out of their Humvee. I could tell
they were Texas boys by the Arrow-T patch on their uniforms. My
grandfathers wore the same patch. They told me they had been on
deployment in South Texas for a year.

When I asked how the deployment was, one of them sheepishly

grinned. He pointed at the spot where the fencing ended. “It’s the
same shit, different year.” I had caught them napping, after all.

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As I drove north to San Angelo and out of the borderlands, I realized

I was re-entering the United States. The de facto United States, at
least. As I have written for this magazine, narco-terrorists maintain
operational control of large swaths of Mexican territory. but in the
past two years, due to federal neglect, Mexican cartels have
expanded their operational control into the United States. What
Pancho Villa couldn’t accomplish, his spiritual successors have.

Law enforcement is outnumbered, out-paid, and outgunned in

Mexico. Policymakers are left in paralysis, unable to marshal will or
resources to combat the cartels. Now, the same paralysis is
spreading in Texas.

Soon, the same paralysis will spread throughout the United States.
Only a few good men like Sheriff Brad Coe and Constable Justin
West stand in the way, and they are pleading for help. With untold
millions already successfully trafficked into the United States, it is a
matter of time before the hell I've seen is brought to all of God’s
country.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Collin Pruett
Collin Pruett is the engagement director and a staff writer at
American Reformer and a former operations associate at The
American Conservative.

Articles by Collin 

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