Hopeful News for a Change

School Erecting Stone Barrier to Protect Students

Hopeful news in Kinney County. The local Sheriff is reporting that there are signs word may be finally getting out that Kinney County may be a little more aggressive about punishing illegal smuggling and people trafficking than other border areas. Sheriff Brad Coe used the phrase “pushing them sideways” when describing the phenomenon. It basically means the smugglers and cartels may be deciding to avoid the county, and look for easier spots to cross the border.

This comes after Sheriffs deputies used the “scope truck” to locate a particularly large group of 51 illegals. The “scope truck” looks like some kind of military Frankenstein’s monster of a pickup, with the roof of the cab and the bed of the truck bristling with all manner of long distance lenses and other tools, including presumably some kind of infrared camera for nighttime use.

The truck isn’t much use in normal day-to-day law enforcement situations, but is perfect for parking in brush next to some dark hillside and waiting for signs of illegal aliens hiking their way to their next rest stop or rendezvous with a vehicle. Ironically, the truck was purchased years ago with federal grant money.

The information about smugglers being “pushed sideways” into neighboring counties comes from statements made by captured smugglers, and other intelligence collected by the Department of Public Safety.

People who’ve never been to Brackettville can’t always appreciate how small the town is. It’s literally a 2-stoplight village. There’s a light where Ann Street intersects with Spring Street. Ann and Spring are the two main streets in town. There’s another light where Ann Street intersects with Highway 90, a major artery for traffic coming up from Laredo, and heading West to El Paso and points beyond, including Los Angeles once it merges with I-10 after some great distance into West Texas somewhere near Van Horn.

Ann Street runs right past the local school district’s campus— a somewhat sprawling affair that’s reaped a fairly large amount of fortune from the state’s “Robin Hood” school funding program. For the unfamiliar, “Robin Hood,” is a system the state devised years ago, that takes money from wealthy school districts and redistributes it to schools in cash strapped areas.

One of the campus’ oddities is that portions of it actually straddle Ann Street, and students are frequently walking across to the student parking lot, tennis courts, and Central Office. With all of the high speed chases that have threatened to become commonplace in Kinney County, this represents an almost intolerable risk of danger to the lives and limbs of numerous students who could easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With that in mind, the school district has invested in a string of giant landscaping boulders, creating a decorative but sturdy barrier that may help keep students safe from any vehicles jumping the curb.

Traffickers trying to avoid checkpoints in Uvalde and Del Rio tend to cut through Brackettville on Ann Street, leading to ranch roads that go to Rocksprings and Camp Wood, two communities North of Brackett. Many times Deputies and Troopers will be attempting to pull them over in town, which can lead to high speed chases and bailouts across the length of the community.