Texas Sheriffs show strong support at townhall with Trump in Edinburg

County sheriffs from across the Lone Star State descended on the Texas border town Edinburg last week to hear from a definite favorite among the law enforcement community, especially when it came to handling the situation down at our southern border into Mexico, a situation that those same lawmen will tell you has gotten completely out of hand under the leadership—or lack thereof—of the current presidential administration.

More than 1,000 supporters from across the Texas Valley region were already gathering along the expressway near the South Texas International Airport at Edinburg on Tuesday, June 29, where former President Donald Trump was set to conclude his tour of the region with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. 

"It is a crisis of a monumental scale. Border Patrol agents - I spent a lot of time with them today - they are overwhelmed, overworked. Dangerous cartels, they are making millions in human trafficking and taking advantage of the fact that all resources are being used to basically process people who illegally cross over into the country. That gives free rein to the drug dealers and the human traffickers."

 -Sean Hannity with Fox News, as part of introduction for former President Donald Trump on his June 30 news program, filmed live on location in Edinburg, a border community in the far southern tip of Texas.

The two would return to the airport on Wednesday, June 30, for a townhall meeting hosted by Fox News’ Sean Hannity.

Trump is certainly no stranger to Texas’ southern border, “especially after his predecessor Barack Obama left him with an absolute mess,” Hannity said. “President Trump made it his top priority to secure our nation’s borders, and that means enforce laws, protect our sovereignty and protect our borders.”

Hannity reviewed Trump’s record on the border as part of his introduction of the 45^th president for his June 30 show, shot live there in Edinburg, before the massive contingent of Texas sheriffs on hand, including Lavaca County Sheriff Micah Harmon and Jackson County Sheriff Andy Louderback, to name a couple.

"Trump restricted asylum cases. He stopped Obama's disastrous Catch-and-Release Program. He instituted what was known as the Stay-in-Mexico Policy for new migrants. He negotiated deals with several Latin American countries to expedite the deportation of illegal immigrants," Hannity said.

“He successfully built nearly 500 miles of new border wall, and this is important because he told migrants around the world: ‘Do not come to America illegally.’ He was very clear. ‘Don't make this dangerous trip. Don't send your children unaccompanied through Mexico, across the Rio Grande and the desert into the border.’ ”

“Make no mistake,” Hannity continued, “President Trump's actions and rhetoric were as effective as they've ever been. Just look at these headlines: ‘Trump immigration policy showing results with the illegal border crossings plummeting,’ and here’s another, ‘Illegal border crossings continue to fall as U.S. enforces asylum agreements.’ And yet another, ‘ Like them or not, Trump policies are reducing illegal immigration.’ ”

Sadly, just after Joe Biden was sworn in, he reversed almost all of President Trump's border policies, Hannity said.

The failures of the Biden administration—or “President Sippy Cup,” as Hannity called him—have been catastrophic for South Texas.

Back to Hannity: “In February, illegal immigration more than tripled, 100,000 illegal immigrants apprehended in February, 170,000 in March, 178,000 in April, and a whopping 180,000 in May. And by the way, that's only the number of people we caught. They are record-setting numbers, a 30-year high for illegal immigration, and get this: More unaccompanied minors are now crossing our southern border than ever before.

“It is a crisis of a monumental scale,” he said. “Border Patrol agents - I spent a lot of time with them today - they are overwhelmed, overworked. Dangerous cartels, they are making millions in human trafficking and taking advantage of the fact that all the resources are being used to basically process people illegally into the country. That gives free rein to the drug dealers, the human traffickers.

“We know where 90 percent of America's heroin comes from, our southern border,” Hannity said. “We know the Fentanyl crisis. We know the number of deaths that happen each and every week, about 300 all across America, because of these drugs. Migrant facilities now operating at over 300 percent capacity, and with the help of the Biden administration, illegal immigrants are being relocated all over the U.S. in exchange for a mere promise to show up to a late court date, if that date is even given out.”

“This crisis has no end in sight,” he said again. “But instead of reinstating the successful policies of Donald Trump - well, Joe Biden, he punted all border duties to his vice president, Kamala Harris, who for months and months flat out refused to even visit.”

Indeed, Trumps visit on June30 followed that of VP Harris. When she finally agreed to come to the border, months after Biden named her his Border Czar, she toured the region around El Paso, just days prior to Trump’s Hannity appearance Wednesday.

For as emotional as the crowd got with Hannity’s facts and figures during his show, it was hardly new information for most locals. 

Rather, men like Sheriff Harmon, Sheriff Louderback, Sheriff Carl Bowen in DeWitt County and Sheriff Robert Ynclan in Gonzales County, along with County Judges Mark Myers, Pat Davis and Daryl Fowler and  host of other county and state officials have been saying the same for months now.

Following the close of the 87^th Legislature in May, Gov. Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have both shown increased interest in the border issue.

Paxton has fought the Biden administration policies in the courtroom since Biden moved into the White House, with Paxton having now filed more suits against Biden than all other states combined, challenging tons of policies from Medicaid and unemployment programs to oil and gas policies and, repeatedly now, the border.

The governor, mostly in actions taken in June, has now gone on countless tours of the entire border region of Texas, which comprises more than half of the nation’s entire border with Mexico. He declared a state emergency concerning the border, following actions that many locals had already filed weeks prior at their respective county levels. He cracked down on some of the legal challenges lawmen faced in dealing with illegals, and he pledge to commit some $250 million to extend that border wall that President Trump pushed so hard for during his administration.

“Now when the governor talks about the wall and Trump talks about the wall, we’re talking two completely different animals,” Sheriff Harmon said in a phone interview Monday. “Sadly, we as a state can’t just go pick up where Trump left off, because we’d actually be trespassing if we did. That’s federally-owned land that Trump had secured to put up the many miles of secure wall that he envisioned. For us to do something similar, we’d have to secure land rights and let project bids just like the feds did, which means it could be months or possibly even years before we even got started.”

Harmon said the governor’s version of a wall is libel to be of far smaller scale and could even come in the form of barbed wire fence.

“What he needs more than anything right now is a some so of visible line, that offers a clear distinction to people coming across that if you cross this point, you're breaking the law and will be arrested,” Harmon said.

Here in our counties, a good half-day's drive to the actual boarder itself, several have already been jailed for entering the country illegally, the result of lawmen across our region making several captures on an almost daily basis. Locally, there has been a huge spike in property crimes and thefts these few months (as seen in the roughly three dozen stolen one-ton 4x4 pickups that have occurred in the DeWitt-Gonzales-Lavaca county area since the beginning of the year, literally miles of fence destroyed when everyday traffic stops turn into high-speed, cross-county chases that nearly always end in a crash and what local lawmen have dubbed "bailouts," where upon ceasing their flight from police, usually a good dozen or so people jump out of the vehicle and scatter to the four winds - if, that is, they're still able after those crashes.

Often times, they runners disappear in the darkness and brush, leaving behind whatever's left of the stolen vehicle they were driving (usually a one-ton 4x4 pickup, because they go cross country through fence lines and gates far better than other vehicles) along with any passengers who may have been injured in the wreck.

One such incident in Lavaca County, back in March, wound up tapping two departments and eight ambulances from two different services after the the fleeing illegals crashed into a centuries-old oak and their truck (stolen) burst into flames, trapping several injured passengers inside the burning vehicle. Local lawmen risked life and limb to get them out before fire crews could arrive, all because a city policemen tried to pull them over because they came through town a faster than they should have.

Similar instances have required the services of Life Flight air ambulance helicopters about a dozen times now in the last three months, and standard ambulance crews about three times that amount, the costs of which will likely fall on local taxpayers because the runners aren't even giving their names to authorities, much less insurance cards.

Plus, those bailouts take place somewhere in nine-county Golden Crescent region at almost every hour of every day now. Since the governor expanded the laws to allow city and county lawmen to make arrests on illegals for criminal trespass as part of the emergency he declared in June, several have illegals have now been jailed on that charge.

Typically, only the federal government (the folks who should be guarding our borders) are the only ones with the power to prosecute someone for being in our country illegally.

The biggest challenge now, Sheriff Harmon told us, lies with prosecutors in all those counties where arrests of illegals have taken place, especially in some of those larger, more urban, Democratically-held counties along the border. "We can make arrests all day, and all they truly manage to do is use up our own budgets if the prosecutors don’t follow through and press charges against those sitting our jails right now," he said. "In order for any of that to be effective, we've got to start seeing some convictions, otherwise we're chasing our tails."

Already, Biden and company have criticized Texas’ aggressive legal stance on the issue, saying we’re needlessly jailing people here for no cause at all.

That’s easy for him to say, sitting in Washington, D.C. It’s not his fences getting mowed down, or his property and vehicles stolen, or his livestock killed or running loose because of the hundreds of thousands of people now crossing, unchecked, into our country, who pay no heed whatsoever to private property rights or common courtesy.

Harmon said he and fellow lawmen did get participate in a round table with former President Trump, prior to the event, where they were updated on several policy issues, like the extremely lethal Fentanyl and other drugs getting smuggled into the U.S. daily along with the carloads of illegal aliens, led by the many criminal cartels operating along border.

Still, as the sheriff noted, those are topics he and others have been discussing regularly and publicly  since January now. About the biggest piece of news to come out of the Edinburg meeting, Harmon said, was that Trump told everyone gathered that he made a decision about returning to Washington in an official capacity once more.

Sadly, THAT was his news: A decision had been made. 

He offered no indication what that decision might be, Harmon told us, but Trump did say he'll be making announcements later this month that should clear up the issue and let folks know if he'll be back on the ballots or not for President in 2024.

“So far, he’s been real vague about that, even with us,” Harmon said. “But I’d be anticipating an announcement, one way or another, in the next week or two.”

This story, written by managing editor Bobby Horecka and featuring a picture taken by associates of Sheriff A.J. "Andy" Louderback of Jackson County (who, incidentally, is the man featured in the center of the picture above alongside the Tarrant County sheriff, visiting with President Trump in Edinburg), first published in the Wednesday, July 7, edition of the Hallettsville Tribune-Herald.