By Jingles, this time, Congressional Republicans Really Mean It
No, really. They really do. Eagle Pass Part II, Electric Boogaloo
Good morning, friends,
What is there to say about yesterday’s event in Eagle Pass? We have a lot of scattered impressions to add to the already excellent coverage out there, available from Ali Bradley, Auden Cabello, the Epoch Times, and other mainstream national press.
The trick so far has been finding a thread or a seam to sort of tie them all together. And that’s mainly because on the surface of the visit by Congressional Republicans and others, there wasn’t much there other than a lot of hot air and platitudes that many folks living on the border are pretty much done with.
However, one has to remind oneself, that border residents were probably not the intended audience. Indeed, judging by the approved media list, carelessly left unattended, one can assume the intended audience was a national one. Lawmakers are basically still hoping to wake up a dazed middle-american audience to what is going on.
At this stage of things, it’s starting to seem as if that’ll never happen until people find a freshly settled population of migrants in their backyards, tying up social services and breaking their local budgets.
We took a fair number of photos behind the scenes that we’ll share in just few moments, as well as more about some of what we’re hinting at, but let’s back up a moment to the idea of a unifying thread or seam to the whole event.
These 60 lawmakers were almost entirely flown to San Antonio— 1 lawmaker, 1 staffer, and herded onto motor coaches, and driven down to Eagle Pass for the event. That’s a long day and a longer drive— there and back.
Imagine it.
The only thing worse would be making the trip on a yellow dog school bus.
Think about what each individual on those coaches must have seen along the highway.
Small towns. Ranches. Asphalt. Traffic.
In all of the traffic and heading in the other direction, it is a certainty that they passed multiple other coaches and buses, filled to the brim with migrants and fraudulent asylum seekers making their own pilgrimages deeper into the Country, away from the border. Some are going all the way to DC. Others to New York. And still others to Chicago. Some are going straight to the San Antonio airport in a direct mirror image of the trip lawmakers were making to Eagle Pass.
There’s some kind of almost cosmic irony there.
Imagine it— 60 jokers in shirts and ties or business casual, headed south in buses. 600 other jokers in sweatpants and blue jeans heading the other way, also in buses.
We just need elephants, lions, tigers and bears and the circus will be complete.
For all their power, it would seem these lawmakers are not Masters of the Universe, but merely additional cogs in the machine. No wonder there doesn’t seem to be any kind of effective handle on this ridiculous, awful situation.
One Republican that was notably absent from the visit was Central Texas Congressman Chip Roy, who told Fox News that while the trip was a good thing for any lawmakers that haven’t been paying attention, the situation is such that it’s time for much stronger measures.
We agree, obviously.
He also reportedly said Texans are tired of news conferences. That is also true.
We haven’t seen the soundbite ourselves, but a friend tells us the Congressman also said something to the effect of: After coming to the border multiple times over the last few years, and promising some kind of action every time, it’s difficult to countenance coming back down there one more time and facing people there only to say “Hey, gang— still working on it.” We hope that’s accurate. It betokens an awareness of just how strung out many Texans are becoming over this and how frustrated they’re getting after what amounts to years of wasted time and foot-shuffling.
Think about it. Think about those lawmakers getting herded onto those buses, just like they’re a pack of migrants too. What a ridiculous world we’re living in.
Odds are some out there might want to quibble about our take on this symbology, but it’s kind of like modern art. We see what we see. Lump it.
We mentioned Ali Bradley earlier:
Good on Ali for asking a pertinent question. But don’t take the Speaker’s attempt at an artful dodge too terribly seriously. “You have to be able to find them in order to remove them.” That’s code for “Oh gosh, we may not be able to do anything about this!”
That’s utter nonsense. If the Pentagon can find Osama Bin Laden in the middle of Pakistan, DHS can damn sure find a bunch of people that need deporting. If they can go through hours of chaotic January 6th footage and identify folks that may or may not need imprisonment, they can dang sure do this other thing too.
It’s a matter of will.
The sad truth that many national Republicans hope will go overlooked is that a lot of them are utterly beholden to mega donors like the Koch Brothers who are seeing dollar signs in the form of hoped-for cheap labor. The whole “there’s some jobs Americans just won’t do,” narrative.
Absolute nonsense.
We’ve personally driven through just about every state in the lower 48, with the exception of those in New England.
There are communities all throughout America full of people that have been hollowed out by horrible pay, inflation and economic gaslighting, and opiate addiction.
These are people desperate for a feeling of self-determination and agency— the promise of their own aspirations— many of which are quite modest.
They’ll work as hard as anyone. But their labor deserves real compensation. Not the ruthlessly and artificially chiseled down pay that is the result of illegal workers that have no choice, artificially bloated labor pools, and the resulting wage depression that we are all witness to. The tech sector is not immune to this by the way— spend a few minutes investigating H1B abuses and the complaints of many disgruntled Indian and American programmers that have been impacted by it.
These are communities that have become so broken down and hopeless that they make Kinney County and Brackettville feel like comparative paradises. At least here, problems and solutions can be clearly seen. It’s not a matter of ‘hating’ migrants. Or ‘hating’ asylum fraud, or any of that. At the end of the day, it’s a matter of knowing that many of these folks being bused into the United States are going to be at the mercy of the Cartels, operating nationwide thanks to a purposely broken and demoralized Border Patrol. It’s a matter of knowing, as Sheriff Roy Boyd of Goliad, TX has observed, “We are importing a new slave class.” Sheriff Boyd doesn’t mince words.
And he’s not wrong. Freedom and prosperity may be what’s being sold to these poor people, but that’s not at all what’s waiting for them.
No one knows this better than the mandarins at DHS.
Weird.
Ironically, as the gathered lawmakers took their turns at the podium in Eagle Pass, a small family of Venezuelans appeared, crossing the river and interrupting comments by Ohio’s Jim Jordan. This is despite the best efforts to clear out any Migrants on both sides of the river as we documented yesterday—
Fresh from the river, it would seem the family unit in question is fortunate to have avoided whatever cartel or federale sweeps that have disrupted the 3,000 persons daily that have been coming through Eagle Pass until most recently.
So far we’ve mostly shown you other people’s photos and work— so let’s take a moment to publish some of our own. We don’t expect to fool anyone into thinking we have a bright future in taking news photos.
A little bit of the behind the scenes, as the sausage gets made. This is as things started to break up, with lawmakers dispersing for one-on-one interviews:
Look closely to the left edge of the crowd, and squint a little, and you might see Auden Cabello. Looks like he’s fiddling with his phone— probably getting more photos and video uploaded to twitter, instagram, facebook….
It’s too much!
Don’t know how people keep up with getting things up online. Whoever figures out how to write one block of text, and upload one picture to one app that then goes and populates all of your social media is going to officially be the Sauron of the Internet. Forget one ring to rule them all— it’s going to be one app to rule them all in the future.
Could be someone’s already done it, and that’s the secret sauce yours truly has been missing.
A gaggle of reporters and cameras like this is frequently called a scrum. It’s a rugby word, basically referencing a pile of jostling bodies all scrambling toward a goal. In journalism they can be relatively genteel like this particular one, or all elbows and pushing like you sometimes see on courthouse steps and other chaotic situations.
Here’s a look at the reporters row:
We’re standing right in front of the Fox crew’s truck— the big grey hood. If we could do it all over again, we’d have stepped back a few and shot some more of just that truck. The thing is just too pretty to be put to work out in the brush.
It’s covered in scratch resistant paint, winches, widgets, cargo racks— it looks like a Colombian drug dealer’s idea of what an Afghan Technical should look like, minus the .50 cal machine gun. They’re ready to disappear into the desert for a week with that thing. It probably almost never leaves the highway though.
Further down, you can see a tight little satellite truck in black paint— that’s where the Newsnation crew was set up for their live hits and so forth.
At the top of the newsletter, we mentioned the carelessly unattended media list. We should probably talk about that now as we wind things up this morning.
Despite an email to the contrary, saying we’d be on the list, we found out on our arrival that we were not. Almost as if we’d been uninvited, or someone forgot to add us after saying they would.
Who knows.
The funny thing is, after about 20 minutes of standing around and shooting the breeze in the publicly accessible area, people seemed to assume we were on the payroll and began asking us questions as if we were one of the organizers.
Little wonder, since all of the near children who had been wrangling press had disappeared, leaving us to a pleasant conversation with one of the lawmakers’ campaign managers.
We have razors older than some of these kids, friends— daresay some of you do too.
So, we took advantage and looked at the papers they’d abandoned. The approved media list consisted almost entirely of national and statewide press. The only “local” press were the crews from the network affiliates in San Antonio. This would seem to confirm our impression that this event wasn’t really aimed at border residents at all.
Sometime around then, a couple of mostly Spanish speaking correspondents showed up from local media in Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras. They looked at us. DPS looked at us. We shrugged and told them to go on ahead and walk right in. Like a boss.
What a world.
That should do it for now. The sun will be up in an hour. We wish we could say something about how convinced we are that something good will come of this thing, but we aren’t. Convinced.
We hesitate to just totally crap all over the thing, however. While it is true that it felt like something that should have happened back in 2021, instead of 2024, we have to confess that we’re not sure we’re the best judge of what will be effective and what won’t.
Recall— we kind of crapped all over Governor Abbott’s plans to bus migrants to New York and Washington D.C. when they were first announced. And yet, that’s arguably the only thing that’s really moved the dial in a big noticeable way. Some say the busing is bad— that it contributes to the dispersal of migrants around the country and Texas shouldn’t be doing it. They’re not wrong in saying it— but in a realpolitik sense— sometimes a lesser ‘evil’ is good in the long run— especially if it makes folks in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere wake the heck up and pay attention to what they’ve been ignoring.
So— who knows— maybe we’re wrong about this thing too. It could be that it’s a display by the Speaker— demonstrating that he’s now in charge and there’s going to be some changes in DC.
If only. Getting 60+ cats herded up and all moving in one direction is a demonstration of control all by itself, one supposes. Especially when you think some more about that 2-hour ride on a bus.
Have a great morning— we’ll see you again soon. As always, no one should mistake this newsletter for any kind of an official communication on behalf of Kinney County. Despite our employment there, this remains an independent work product. The newsletter is a solo project, and any errors, misdeeds, or bad takes are entirely our own doing and responsibility.
We’ll be back again soon enough— maybe just to revisit the Global Compact on Migration, which doesn’t get enough attention, but largely goes unmentioned because it is such a mess to unravel in the midst of everything else that’s going on.
If you can’t wait until then— here’s one of our earliest passes on the subject from way back when, filed in the closing days of the Haitian crisis in Del Rio back in 2021.
