A Celebrity Smuggler?
And, Verbal Gyrations as Certain Lawmakers Struggle to Avoid Speaking Plainly
Good morning, friends,
As longtime readers can attest, we generally try to avoid getting sucked into the minutiae of reporting on every last high-speed chase and bailout in Kinney County. It’d be a full-time job in and of itself, honestly.
But every once in a while, something unusual happens.
That’s a photo of a man that Deputies say was riding shotgun on a recent smuggling attempt in Kinney County.
His name is Vincent Thabiso Jobo. And based on our own research, we are convinced he’s a professional rugby player, originally from South Africa, that came to the US on some kind of a visa and played for teams in Austin and New Orleans.
Begs the question— how’s a guy like that end up in a situation like this?
We’ll do our best to answer that in just a moment— first, the circumstances behind his arrest:
It all started on a dark Thursday night last week, when a Kinney County Deputy attempted to pull over this silver Porsche SUV on Ranch Road 334.
As is all too common, the driver slowed down just enough that his passengers could begin bailing out. 5 people who we can safely assume were illegal aliens dropped out of the car and rolled into the brush before disappearing over a fence into a rancher’s pasture.
The Deputy stayed with the Porsche until the driver pulled over. He’s identified as Abdul Razzaq Ahmed Mohammed.
Mohammed, near as we can tell, does not appear to be a professional athlete of any sort.
He had a Texas driver’s license with an address for a Northeast Austin Apartment complex on it.
According to the license, he’s 20-years-old.
Back to Vincent, or Vince, as he appears to go by online.
Apparently, his Rugby career is significant enough, he has his own page on Wikipedia.
Near as we can tell, Jobo came to the US back in 2017, looking for a new challenge and fresh territory in the late stages of his career, and played for an Austin Club team called the “Blacks,” presumably a homage to the storied New Zealand All-Blacks who are known for performing a Māori haka during their appearances.
After a year in Austin, he signed with a professional team in New Orleans called the “NOLA Gold.”
Injuries followed, keeping him off the field— a torn Achilles tendon one season, and then a broken arm the next.
It’s not exactly clear what happened after that, but if you dig persistently enough, you can find interviews with overseas sports websites, where Jobo describes fighting depression while in the States, and being forced to seek treatment by his girlfriend.
You can also find an interview recorded with Jobo back in 2020, where he describes being so far down on his luck at one point, he was eating out of trashcans and showing up for training on an empty stomach. It’s not clear to us if he was talking about his current life — or his youth in South Africa.
There are also scattered hints online of other legal troubles encountered in at least one Louisiana parish. Attempts to run those down have been fruitless, however, ending in various error pages on random mugshot websites.
With a little imagination, one can mentally sketch out a simple scenario of a high-performing athlete down to the bitter dregs of an injury-plagued career’s end who follows past friendships back to Austin, back to Texas, where the high cost of living may’ve led him to take a chance— given false assurances that smuggling aliens is muy facil.
Apparently, Jobo has overstayed his visa and is subject to an ICE detainer. Even if he’s able to plea bargain or somehow avoid State charges, deportation is all but certain.
Things have actually been rather nuts around here since we talked last. Most everyone’s seen the footage from Eagle Pass, which is prompting fresh concerns as even some Texas Democrats are having to gingerly suggest some possible solutions— a tacit admission that DHS, the White House, and the President are screwing up.
Here’s what Laredo Democrat Henry Cuellar is saying:
Asked about Biden sending 800 troops to the border and approving more than 400,000 work visas for Venezuelans, Cuellar said the actions "provide some assistance," but won't address the issue.
"You've got to have policies that have repercussions," the Democratic lawmaker said, adding border crossers only see the border as a "speed bump."
"The Biden administration is not doing enough," Cuellar said.
He also called on more action from Mexico in handling border crossings.
"We can continue playing defense on the one-yard line or we can play defense at their 20 yard line," he said.
—Reporter Zachary Leeman, from the abovementioned article
The key point being made here by a Democrat(!) is the bit where he’s talking about the need for repercussions.
The Congressman and the article also seem to suggest that allowing 400-thousand work visas for Venezuelans is a step in the right direction, however— and that is absolute lunacy.
That’s basically an amnesty. And it’s precisely the reason Eagle Pass is getting crushed.
It is because of this DeFacto amnesty, the “temporary protected status” that this reporter and the Congressman are slobbering over, that every last Venezuelan that’s able to is rushing the border trying to get here in time to try and qualify for a work visa.
It’s about the same as dangling red meat in front of a starving bear with a muzzle covered in cocaine dust.
If work visas are what they think of as a solution to this problem, we’d sure hate to see what they’d do to try and make things worse.
Wait a minute.
Isn’t that weird? Making things worse, and trying to say it’s an attempt to make things better…
Are we on crazy pills? It’s like the White House and some of these lawmakers are speaking some kind of nuEnglish, and those of us still speaking plain English are left floundering about, while they get on with the process of double-plus-ungood immigration enforcement.
We had a lot less of these problems when ICE was known for deporting people all the way back to their country of origin.
That’s what a real repercussion looks like. No one wants to hike across Mexico only to wind up back in Venezuela.
One other thing we have to take issue with is the Congressman’s talk about how we need to lean more on Mexico to get them to tighten up their border controls.
He’s not the only one saying it, but whatever.
What in the hell is going on when the USA needs to beg Mexico to help police the US border?
Doesn’t that seem kind of stupid to anyone else?
That seems like admitting that we can’t police a damn thing ourselves. Who knows— maybe the Congressman has been in Austin recently, and the situation there has left him pessimistic about the state of American law-enforcement in general.
History and human nature would suggest it’d be a lot easier for us to police our own borders, than it would be to rely on Mexico’s corrupt and cartel beholden government to do it for us.
Heck— why stop there if you’re going to do that? Why not ask Mexico to contribute warm bodies to fill out our armed forces’ recruiting shortfalls too! Wouldn’t that be nice? A real win-win?
So weird.
It should be obvious by now to anyone that’s been paying attention that the White House is fine with what’s happening. The only thing that’s bothering them is when matters become so obviously screwed up, much like they were when the Haitian incident occupied the Port of Entry in Del Rio and here again with the Venezuelans in Eagle Pass.
Some conspiracy theorists suggest that such migrational pileups must surely be engineered by the Cartels— sending a message of some sort to the US and Mexican governments.
We find it hard to disagree, given how in control of things the Cartels have been all along.
Question is, what’s the message? Is it as simple as “pay us more,” or “the fentanyl is coming where the migrants aren’t,” or is it something else?
Who knows?
Straight answers are in such short supply.
We’re almost done— but one of our last newsletters made mention of former Texas Governor W. Lee O’Daniel, “Pappy O’Daniel”, who was perhaps further immortalized by the Coen Brothers and Actor Charles Durning in the film “O’ Brother Where Art Thou.”
After reading it, one of our oldest subscribers— the fellow we sometimes refer to as Mr. Local Wag— said he wanted to see more “Pappy posting.”
Who are we to deny such a reasonable request?
O’Daniel’s Wikipedia entry is actually quite substantial and includes a lot of little notes that we ourselves were ignorant of— including the fact that he was once in Lyndon B. Johnson’s way— holding him off to win a Senate campaign in one of the most controversial elections in Texas history.
Pretty big deal for a Radio pioneer and flour salesman. As it turns out— his lack of a “proper” pedigree is what probably made his time as Governor relatively unspectacular. It seems the Legislature resented his presence, and actively rebelled against whatever his stated objectives were.
Instead of facing another campaign against LBJ, O’Daniel decided to retire instead, clearing the way for LBJ’s ascension to the Senate, though O’Daniel would later rouse himself to seek high office once more, unsuccessfully. A casualty of time and memory, it seems.
Some believe his later campaigns were troubled by a reliance on racism and racist appeals that alienated many younger voters. Critics charitably suggest that O’Daniel was doing so in an attempt to capture the attention that he no longer commanded and may not have actually been all that exceptionally racist by the standards of the day.
O'Daniel also hosted a regular noontime radio show heard statewide, which gave him his nickname after a catchphrase used frequently on air – "pass the biscuits, Pappy" – and propelled him into the public spotlight. By the mid-1930s, "Pappy" O'Daniel was a household name in Texas. As a national magazine reporter wrote at the time: "At twelve-thirty sharp each day, a fifteen-minute silence reigned in the state of Texas, broken only by mountain music, and the dulcet voice of W. Lee O'Daniel." The show extolled the values of Hillbilly brand flour, the Ten Commandments and the Bible.
—From the Wikipedia entry
Dulcet voice, the wiki says. If you’re like us, friends, you’re probably wondering just how dulcet his voice really was.
Here you go:
Pappy O’Daniel made it to the age of 79. He died in Dallas, May 11, 1969.
That should do it for now— we’re anticipating another edition soon, perhaps, depending on what we learn in the course of events this week.
As always, we should mention that this newsletter is an independent work product— kept as divorced as possible from our day job fielding public information requests for Kinney County.
It is put out into the world without any sort of oversight, and any errors, misdeeds, or other problems are entirely our own and no one should mistake this humble newsletter for any kind of an official statement on behalf of Kinney County government.
Have a great day and we’ll see you again somewhere further on down the road.
Edited to correct the spelling of minutiae. The person responsible for this error cannot be sacked. Thank you for the notification, it is much appreciated.