There’s a reason Native Americans called barbed wire the “ devil’s rope.”
The cruel embrace of the spikes offered 19th century settlers the solution they’d been looking for to stake their claims out west: a fence that kept cattle in, and undesirables out. Unsuspecting wild buffalo and longhorns often became ensnared, thrashing their bodies against the wire, not knowing that the more they struggled, the more they’d suffer. If hunger or thirst didn’t kill them, infections from their festering wounds would.
Though many cowboys and even ranchers protested the wire and its agonizing violence, the devil’s rope offered something too tempting: dominion.
Over countless wars, that design has been perfected into even more barbaric forms, including razor wire — the kind that Gov. Greg Abbott has strung along the Rio Grande as part of his billion-dollar border security initiative.
The war we’re fighting now, Abbott and his cronies argue, is at our southern border. And the enemy? Smugglers and organized crime, of course. But also, desperate families of men, women and children, many seeking asylum.
That includes an unsuspecting 19-year-old who became trapped in wire and writhed in pain while suffering from a miscarriage. A man who tried to free his child from the unrelenting teeth of a razor-wrapped barrel and earned a “significant laceration” on his left leg.
A 15-year-old boy who broke his right leg in the currents because the razor wire was “laid out in a manner that it forced him into the river where it is unsafe to travel.” And a 4-year-old girl caught trying to cross the wire and pressed back until, in the triple-digit heat, she passed out from exhaustion.
These are just a few of the disturbing images revealed in an explosive email by Nicholas Wingate, a Department of Public Safety paramedic and trooper who has sounded the alarm on the “inhumane” directives of Operation Lone Star. According to the email, obtained by Hearst Newspapers, these directives include pushing people back to Mexico at all costs, and despite the record-breaking temperatures in border cities this summer, an order prohibiting officers from handing out water to asylum seekers.
In the email to his superior, Wingate explains how, faced with a group of 120 exhausted and hungry people with small children and nursing babies in tow, the shift officer in command gave the order to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico.” But the troopers didn’t feel that was right, especially “with the very real potential of exhausted people drowning.”
After expressing these concerns to command again, they were told to “tell them to go to Mexico” and to get into their vehicle and leave, which they did. Border Patrol later worked with other troopers to administer care to the migrants.
We commend the troopers courageous enough to show Abbott what a moral compass looks like.
It appears DPS officials are taking the allegations seriously. DPS Director Steven McCraw said that while there’s no official policy barring troopers from giving out water, the agency’s inspector general is investigating concerns raised in the email and an audit will assess how to minimize risks to migrants: “The smugglers care not if the migrants are injured, but we do,” he said.
At least, we should. Reporting showed that Mc-Craw was already aware of the increase in injuries from the wire, including seven additional incidents reported by Border Patrol where migrants needed “elevated medical attention” from July 4 to July 13.
For too long, leaders– both Democratic and Republican — have struck a Faustian bargain, relying on deterrence through brutality as a substitute for thoughtful policy. Rather than “secure the border,” these tactics have only increased the number of human remains that wash up on the Rio Grande banks. They’ve deeply scarred too many soldiers left to do the dirty work of cowardly elected leaders, and taken the lives of several National Guardsmen. Concertina wire and booby traps can’t distinguish between a criminal and a nursing mom. But the men and women in uniform who work our border can. The crisis at our border is a humanitarian one and it requires humans to handle it with compassion and consideration, not a merciless barrier of deterrents. It requires clear, accessible legal pathways that encourage migrants to safely access ports of entry.
Even if DPS were to insist on humane treatment of all migrants, the cruelty won’t be forgotten, especially by the family and loved ones of the men, women and children whose last breath was at our border. And the cruelty won’t really cease until Congress repairs our broken immigration system and politicians like Abbott stop their barbed assaults– in rhetoric and in weaponry– that exploit the life-ordeath struggles of migrants as easy campaign kindling.
“Barbed wire proclaims that you are kept out or kept in, and, when you resist, it rips you,” W.H. Auden wrote in a poem after World War II. ... As it was when western lands were dominated and wrenched from Native Americans’ hands, the cruelty is the point.
