Chronicle Editorial-Updated with Texas trooper perspective

[Pimpadeaux 2,405]

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 McCraw 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-or-death 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. “Other barriers weather, crumble, grow moss; wire merely rusts, and keeps its sting.”   

As it was when western lands were dominated and wrenched from Native Americans’ hands, the cruelty is the point. 
 

[EternalShinyAndChrome 4,001]

Aww...to bad, so sad.

Pimpadouche slurping up the DNC Glory Hole propaganda, once again. 

[Patented Phil 1,469]

Yawn.

[dogcows 1,030]

Abbott is ignoring federal orders to remove the death traps. They violate federal law as well as 2 treaties we have with Mexico. The idiot cripple who is in a wheelchair because he was too slow to outrun a tree thinks he’s above the law.

A majority of Texans voted for this guy?

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2023/07/24/deadline-today-for-texas-to-renounce-use-of-razor-wire-at-border-or-face-feds-in-court/

[Hardcore troubadour 15,211]

Americans sleeping in the street, Chicago gets shot up every weekend, kids in democrat cities can’t read.  But these clowns are weepy about people from other countries. Traitors. 

[Pimpadeaux 2,405]

26 minutes ago, dogcows said:

Abbott is ignoring federal orders to remove the death traps. They violate federal law as well as 2 treaties we have with Mexico. The idiot cripple who is in a wheelchair because he was too slow to outrun a tree thinks he’s above the law.

A majority of Texans voted for this guy?

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2023/07/24/deadline-today-for-texas-to-renounce-use-of-razor-wire-at-border-or-face-feds-in-court/

It's shameful. Worst governor this state has ever had.

[Pimpadeaux 2,405]

22 minutes ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

Americans sleeping in the street, Chicago gets shot up every weekend, kids in democrat cities can’t read.  But these clowns are weepy about people from other countries. Traitors. 

Chicago!

I spent some time there on vacation recently. Fabulous, vibrant city.

 

[Hardcore troubadour 15,211]

31 minutes ago, Pimpadeaux said:

Chicago!

I spent some time there on vacation recently. Fabulous, vibrant city.

 

So, they don’t have a shooting problem? You were probably spending too much time looking up at the big buildings, goober. Lol

[RogerDodger 797]

1 hour ago, Pimpadeaux said:

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 McCraw 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-or-death 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. “Other barriers weather, crumble, grow moss; wire merely rusts, and keeps its sting.”   

As it was when western lands were dominated and wrenched from Native Americans’ hands, the cruelty is the point. 
 

You're just going to plagiarize the Houston Cronical like that huh?  

[Pimpadeaux 2,405]

7 minutes ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

So, they don’t have a shooting problem? You were probably spending too much time looking up at the big buildings, goober. Lol

Impoverished areas have a crime and violence problem. I don't vacation in impoverished areas. 

I enjoyed sightseeing, theater, music, fine dining and the vibe of a great American city.

You should try that sometime instead living in your ignorance cocoon and taking a relatively small negative thing and using it to cast the negativity net over the whole. 

Chicago!

 

[Hardcore troubadour 15,211]

4 minutes ago, Pimpadeaux said:

Impoverished areas have a crime and violence problem. I don't vacation in impoverished areas. 

I enjoyed sightseeing, theater, music, fine dining and the vibe of a great American city.

You should try that sometime instead living in your ignorance cocoon and taking a relatively small negative thing and using it to cast the negativity net over the whole. 

Chicago!

 

Lol. I went to Chicago my first time when you were on wife #1.  You’re just getting there? Let me know the next time you finally get someplace. I’ve probably been there already. I’ll give you the heads up. 

[Pimpadeaux 2,405]

3 minutes ago, RogerDodger said:

You're just going to plagiarize the Houston Cronical (<==== misspelled, dumbass) like that huh?  

Plagiarize? I most obviously attributed it to the Houston Chronicle in the thread title. You're getting dumber by the minute. You don't even know the definition of plagiarzed.

[Pimpadeaux 2,405]

2 minutes ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

Lol. I went to Chicago my first time when you were on wife #1.  You’re just getting there? Let me know the next time you finally get someplace. I’ve probably been there already. I’ll give you the heads up. 

He's been everywhere, man. He's been everywhere.

[Fireballer 2,641]

Kamala told them not to come

 

[RogerDodger 797]

4 minutes ago, Pimpadeaux said:

Plagiarize? I most obviously attributed it to the Houston Chronicle in the thread title. You're getting dumber by the minute. You don't even know the definition of plagiarzed.

You got me. I missed the thread title the first time.  Rusty 1 Rodger 2,987.  

[Hardcore troubadour 15,211]

1 minute ago, Fireballer said:

Kamala told them not to come

 

That’s awesome ! 

[Thornton Melon 617]

So they have a problem with the way we're trying to keep out intruders? Fock'em...

[Pimpadeaux 2,405]

I have a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper as a client. He just left my. I asked him what he thought about the border situation, and he had some interesting observations.

1.) Those barrels covered in razor wire stretch only 1,000 feet, and he said their presence is 100 percent a political show to make Gov. Greg Abbott look like he's tough on the border. He said everything the governor is doing in regard to the border and the DPS involvement in it is political.

2.) He said the border should be the Border Patrol's job, not something the Texas DPS should handle. He's been sent down there many times for border duty.

3.) He said that because DPS presence has been minimized, motorists have realized this and are speeding and driving recklessly to their hearts' content. This has resulted in a massive spike in highway fatalities, particularly in our own county. Texting while driving has increased as well, causing even more crashes.

4.) I asked him if he though the wall worked, and he said it did and that it was better than nothing. He said he's seen people climb over it and saw through it, but as a whole it worked as a deterrent, so my longstanding view of the border wall has changed drastically. He said the wall makes it easier to use drones instead of manpower to control.

5.) He said other countries have far more effective border patrol that could be used here. He had to go, so we didn't get deep into that one. 

6.) He said it would help if we had more lenient immigration policies for these people.

[seafoam1 2,905]

Just like this thread...

 

[EternalShinyAndChrome 4,001]

17 hours ago, Pimpadeaux said:

It's shameful. Worst governor this state has ever had.

DRAMA QUEEN NEWS FLASH!!!

Guy that Pimpadouche doesn't like is WORST GUY EVER™!!  Tears, butthurt and fake outrage ensue.  Tune in again in 5 minutes when new guy that doesn't vote like Pimpadouche will be the WORST GUY EVER™!!

[TBayXXXVII 2,517]

51 minutes ago, Pimpadeaux said:

I have a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper as a client. He just left my. I asked him what he thought about the border situation, and he had some interesting observations.

1.) Those barrels covered in razor wire stretch only 1,000 feet, and he said their presence is 100 percent a political show to make Gov. Greg Abbott look like he's tough on the border. He said everything the governor is doing in regard to the border and the DPS involvement in it is political.

2.) He said the border should be the Border Patrol's job, not something the Texas DPS should handle. He's been sent down there many times for border duty.

3.) He said that because DPS presence has been minimized, motorists have realized this and are speeding and driving recklessly to their hearts' content. This has resulted in a massive spike in highway fatalities, particularly in our own county. Texting while driving has increased as well, causing even more crashes.

4.) I asked him if he though the wall worked, and he said it did and that it was better than nothing. He said he's seen people climb over it and saw through it, but as a whole it worked as a deterrent, so my longstanding view of the border wall has changed drastically. He said the wall makes it easier to use drones instead of manpower to control.

5.) He said other countries have far more effective border patrol that could be used here. He had to go, so we didn't get deep into that one. 

6.) He said it would help if we had more lenient immigration policies for these people.

So basically, Trump's policies were helping and then Biden came in and forced the state to take matters in their own hands... which is to a detriment of the locals.  Sounds about right.  Pretty much what conservatives have been saying since 2016.