Keep an Eye on Eagle Pass
Plus, a Personal Encounter with Child Trafficking in Kinney County, And, Just What is CBP's Tree-Gate? Read to the end, you don't want to miss out.
Good morning, friends,
It’s been relatively quiet for months down here on this section of the Rio Grande. Indeed— it’s been quieter overall, all along the river. What action there was, seemed to be mostly happening West of Val Verde County, between Sanderson and Alpine, which lie between Del Rio and El Paso.
But that has been changing over the course of the last 2-to-3-weeks. Eagle Pass/Maverick County has been seeing large groups of roughly 100 at a time— and some of those groups have had large numbers of unaccompanied children with them.
As Donald Trump seems to be out in front of this presidential race right now— one can’t help but notice reports of more and more migrants slipping away from the ‘migrant containment zone’ that the Mexican Government has set up in its Southern states and cities.
Recall— it was only after some heavy diplomacy involving Anthony Blinken and others making almost secret trips to Mexico to negotiate with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, that Mexico seemed to agree to clamp down and clean things up— possibly because the border crisis was killing Democrats in the polls as the election loomed closer and closer.
Well, since then, Joe Biden has become the lamest of lame duck Presidents, and AMLO has been replaced by Claudia Scheinbaum.
How much longer can any sort of negotiated agreement remain in place? Clearly not much longer, if at all.
Kinney County Sheriff’s Deputy Hank Dicke had a taste of the limelight recently— appearing in a short piece, posted to X/Twitter by a video-journalist named Cam Higby, who’s visited Kinney County in the past.
In it, Deputy Dicke tells a story about crossing paths with a group of migrants and how it quickly became obvious that the young girl with them was not their child or a relative.
Not sure when exactly this happened— it didn’t happen that night— and probably not that week. Sad fact is, however, area lawmen cross paths with ridiculous fake ‘family groups’ like the Deputy is describing all the time.
There’s been occasions Deputies and Border Patrol agents have found children abandoned and alone— left behind and left to die, because the people sneaking into the US decide they’re too much of a liability.
It looks like Deputy Dicke will appear in longer-form in an upcoming documentary Higby is putting together.
Many folks are keeping an eye on the Sheriff’s race in Galveston County. If the Democrat, Mark Salinas, wins he says he’s going to take his deputies off of the Southern Border Task Force.
This is of special concern here in Kinney County— long time readers are familiar with the presence of Galveston County Sheriff’s Deputies and Deputy Constables here.
Anna-Catherine Brigida took a closer look at the situation, reporting for the online web-magazine “Houston Landing.”
Since 2021, Galveston County Sheriff’s Office has participated in Gov. Greg Abbott’s border initiative Operation Lone Star. The county sends its deputies to the border to arrest migrants and smugglers as part of the initiative that has come under fire for human rights abuses. The future of Galveston’s participation in the $11 billion initiative now hangs in the balance before Nov. 5 sheriff elections.
The county will elect a new sheriff to replace Sheriff Henry Trochesset, of the Republican party, who will retire in January after serving as sheriff since 2013. Running for the Republican Party is Jimmy Fullen, a former Galveston constable whose peace officer license was recommended to be revoked by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement and who has made border security a key campaign promise. His Democratic opponent, Mark Salinas, promises to focus resources locally on Galveston, particularly on youth.
—Anna Catherine Brigida, Houston Landing
It’s no exaggeration to say that the Galveston Crew of volunteer Sheriff’s Deputies and Deputy Constables have played a big role in the thousands of arrests that have been made here. Just how many? Well, exact numbers escape us right now, but we passed 9,000 trespassing arrests a long time ago. And we kind of stopped keeping a running total on the smuggling arrests when they neared 1,000. The numbers were rolling too quickly, and we have little doubt these numbers could all be substantially higher.
We do recall one Galveston Deputy telling us a tale about pulling over a vehicle in Kinney County that was from the Island. In it were a man and a woman, an assortment of migrants, and an assortment of meth. He says they were *the* connect for all the meth being dealt on the island at the time— and he arrested them here in Kinney County after catching them red-handed.
Now, times being what they are— there’s no doubt that someone else has taken over that route, and by now meth is either flowing again to Galveston, or soon will be.
Kinney County only has about 6 deputies working full time, and about a dozen all total when you include part-timers and those positions enabled by State and Federal grants.
Galveston County seem to have about 3-to-6 additional people here at any one time— We’ve never actually tried to count them. It could well be more.
Ana-Catherine Brigida mentioned some kind of controversy about Constable Fullen’s Law Enforcement credentials:
We’ve spoken with other law enforcement figures about the allegations. Most have stopped just short of calling it much ado about nothing, which surprised us. It all sounds quite serious to us. But, from what we gather, it may be something akin to some old or misfiled paperwork combined with some plain ol’ cutthroat island politics that got raised during the Republican primary in Galveston.
For what it’s worth, we may not be an entirely unbiased commentator here— having been rather effusive in our praise of Fullen on social media in the past. We stand by those words.
He’s been absolutely amazing here in Kinney County.
And finally, this morning— have you seen this X/twitter post?
It’s from the official US Customs and Border Protection account— put online back on the 17th of October. The video shows a conga line of CBP Agents passing neatly cut little sections of logs to each other, conveying them to a brush pile. They’re all dolled up in tactical t-shirts and US Customs work clothes, complete with floppy hats and eye protection— as the text leads you to believe they’re formally participating in the clean up after Hurricane Milton: “The safety of the American people is our top priority,” is how they end the post.
Absolutely comical.
Even before learning what we’re about to relate— we could tell the entire post is an unbelievably stupid joke, dreamed up in some marketing/publicity drone’s head.
If those agents were truly involved in real disaster recovery work— they wouldn’t have 20 of them at one location, humping neat little logs in a conga-line at one solitary address, posing for the camera. That’s one thing.
And once you realize that— knowing that there are people in North Carolina that remain in absolutely uncertain conditions still—it becomes even more obnoxious and objectionable.
We had a few laughs about the video with some of our sources in homeland security.
One tells us that CBP has doubled down. He sent us a screen shot from an internal website— we’d post it, but we don’t want to slip up somehow if it’s traceable back to him, showing how they’re presenting the event internally.
The copy on the screen reads: “You could call it the Tale of Sherwood’s Forest,” We interrupt to point out— it’s actually supposed to be just Sherwood Forest. Sigh.
“You could call it the Tale of Sherwood’s Forest, but it happened in Valrico, Florida, October, 14th, not in England. CBP’s Disaster Awareness Response Team, or DART, removed a gigantic tree-sized branch that had been felled by Hurricane Milton.”
The text goes on to reveal, the mighty limb had fallen on the property of a CBP Employee— an Agriculture Inspector.
That’s right— not only was it a swell photo op— they got to help one of their own, and not some icky stranger of a taxpayer. Isn’t that swell?
Just to underline matters, our source makes sure we know— that they basically rousted a bunch of federal employees, in order to save one of their own from having to hire a tree-cutter, and used it as a photo op, masquerading as some kind of formal Hurricane Milton response on public-facing social media.
You have to laugh. So clumsy. So stupid. Tree-gate indeed. If only such simple stupidity could be blamed for the whole of the border crisis. Or the ongoing failure to provide meaningful help to devastated families in North Carolina and Tennessee.
That should do it for now.
We didn’t mean to leave the newsletter lying fallow for quite as long as we have. But we don’t mind admitting that it was very difficult to sit down in front of this blank screen. Every time we did, we couldn’t help but dwell on our mother’s passing— transporting ourselves back to her hospital bedside, where we published our last two editions months ago. It felt almost as though we might be prolonging our grief by attempting to write.
It now feels as though the grief might never actually fade, and that “getting over it,” will actually have to be a matter of learning how to carry on, despite what feels like the near constant presence of her loss in our thoughts.
Since we last published, we’ve picked up quite a few new subscribers, who seem to have found their way here via Substack recommendations from Dave Bondy, and Current Revolt. Welcome to you all, thanks for taking the time to read these words. And thank you Dave and Tony for keeping the Cavalry-Dispatch in your recommendations.
As always, we should mention our day job— handling press inquiries and public information requests for Kinney County.
The founding of the newsletter predates our employment with the County, and we maintain it out of a sense of obligation to our readers, and because it’s fun, though the idea of a PIO acting like a reporter would’ve been quite offensive to a younger version of ourselves.
This humble newsletter should not be mistaken for any kind of official communications on behalf of the County— indeed, it is kept entirely separate and is published without any sort of oversight.
In other words, sometimes it’s a little raw and wriggling ‘round here.
Have a great morning and we’ll see you again soon.
Thank you, Matt. Good to see you back in the saddle. I keep you and Mike in my prayers often. Be happy today. Life is short and things are going to get worse.