Sheriffs in Texas counties have begun to charge illegal immigrants for trespassing, evading arrest, and even child endangerment, among other things.
The story: Edwards County and Kinney County are trying to deter illegal immigrants who enter the U.S. without being spotted by Border Patrol, according to The Epoch Times. To do so, they are charging them for various violations of the law.
It’s their way to take matters into their own hands, get illegal immigrants into the system in hopes of prompting them to avoid their counties, and subsequently reduce crime, the report says.
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe explained: “I’m going to start here, locally. If we catch them, we’re going to start prosecuting these people that are trespassing on y’all’s property. And whatever other legitimate charge we can stack on there to try to deter them from coming to Kinney County. We’re going to try to hold these people accountable.”
Coe said his office even gave ranchers authority to file charges if an illegal immigrant ends up on their property.
An example: Coe pointed to the recent arrest of a woman who tried to run away from the police with her 7-year-old child. The sheriff said that when a deputy pulled over the vehicle she was in, the woman took the child and went into a nearby scrubland, highlighting that she had no food or water with her.
Coe suggested that this case inspired him to come up with the plan to file charges against illegal immigrants in the county.
“And I said, ‘Now’s the time to start,’” Coe told the outlet. “Let’s file charges against her for child endangerment based on the fact that she ran out of the car, she had no bags, no nothing with her, no food, no water for that kid, 7 years old. You’ve seen the weather down here, some days it’s 90 degrees, 110 degrees. What was she planning on doing with that child in the brush with no food and no water?”
The sheriff said the county handed over the woman and the child to Border Patrol but will continue to pursue the charges against the woman in front of a grand jury.
“If they ‘true bill’ it, then we’ll put a warrant out for her arrest, and wherever she turns up, we’ll go get her and bring her back,” Coe said. “If we do arrest her, and she gets sentenced to a year or six months, whatever the case may be, if she ever tries to file for some type of assistance here, or become a citizen … that’d be a check mark against her.
“Some type of consequence has to be there,” he noted.
Worth noting: The sheriff’s charges will also be reviewed by Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith.
“We’re trying to make sure they’re held accountable for breaking the laws in our state and our nation. And so, if [President Joe] Biden is not going to enforce the law, then we’re going to try to enforce our own state laws,” Smith said.
Number of illegal crossings: The outlet reports that around 1,000 migrants cross the U.S.-Mexico border without being detected by the Border Patrol.
How we got here: Earlier this year in April, Kinney County declared a local disaster, citing the jump in border crossing and claiming that it put residents “under imminent threat of disaster from the human trafficking occurring on our border with Mexico.”
The Epoch Times says that most of the illegal immigrants that enter the county cross the border via the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector, where agents have arrested a total of 95 sex offenders so far this fiscal year. The previous fiscal year, for example, they only apprehended six. The number of arrested criminals has also increased. They’re not counting 813 criminals compared to the 161 in the previous fiscal year in 2020.
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