Deadly Crashes & Child Smuggling

New: The Killer Driver that Border Patrol Captured and Released

Good morning, friends,

Haven’t seen any stats, but it’s pretty obvious that things are busier than they were just 3 weeks ago in this section of the Rio Grande. Suspect it’s the same all along the river.

Been looking for some kind of explanation that might’ve slipped through the cracks, but the obvious answer is staring us all in the face. Sweater season has arrived. It’s just plain easier and safer to cross now. Lower temperatures. And more people are pushing their luck with the fraudulent asylum claims— caravaning up from Southern Mexico— and more are pushing their luck with human smuggling as well.

By now, most of our readers are surely aware of two major incidents that have been dominating the news since the middle of last week, but let’s not assume anything, and take a quick review:

The biggest is probably the head-on collision that happened in Zavala County, in the town of Batesville, killing 8 people.

Head-on-Collision in Batesville, images from DPS/Zavala Co. SO, per Newsnation’s Ali Bradley

A 17-year-old Honduran, named Luiz Mencias Escobar, was racing— trying to escape DPS pursuit, with a whole gang of illegal aliens crammed into a white import. He apparently tried passing an 18-wheeler on a curve and smashed head on into another vehicle, occupied by Jose and Isabel Lerma— a pair of US citizens who lived in Dalton, Georgia and were on their way to visit family and friends in Mexico.

Jose and Isabel Lerma, image Courtesy: gofundme.com

No survivors. 8 people perished.

Sunday night came word that Mencias Escobar, the Honduran, had a prior record and relationship with Border Patrol. He’d been captured by Zavala County deputies and turned over to Border Patrol, while riding shotgun on a previous smuggling attempt in Zavala County last April. Prior to that, in 2019, a Judge ordered his removal. In a sane world— he would’ve been deported, and the Lermas and his passengers would still be alive. He’d still be breathing too.

Luiz Mencias Escobar, after his initial arrest. Now Deceased. Courtesy: Zavala Co. SO, from: Newsnation/Ali Bradley

Instead— because of misbegotten White House policies that were interpreted to qualify him as “not a threat,” he was turned over to his mother, who lives in Houston.

No removal.

It’s not clear if the mother is even legal, frankly. One suspects that she’s not. Or if she is, it’s a technicality— where they’re waiting for a garbage asylum hearing. Who knows? We certainly don’t. Maybe she is legal, and we just need to reexamine what kind of criteria constitutes a “threat.”

Let’s look at the Lermas again:

You just know, that’s a man that has worked hard every day of his life. Look at the beautiful brick house behind them. No “hover hand” in this picture— just love. Look at those smiles. This is awful. Here’s the gofundme, started by a child, hoping to cover funeral expenses.

Dalton is a mid-sized community in the Northwest corner of Georgia. Not far away from Chattanooga, Tennessee— part of the “tri-state-area,” that includes Northeast Alabama. It’s a beautiful area, full of greenery and woodlands. Dalton’s home to numerous carpet manufacturers, and probably also hosts one of the biggest concentrations of Hispanics in the Southeast, who’ve been traveling back and forth from there to work in the factories. Some start off as illegal workers— others begin the begin process of becoming legal.

Don’t know the Lerma’s origin story— but it’s certain that there are thousands of good, hardworking people just like them in the Dalton area. Their death is a tremendous shame, compounded by how unnecessary it is.

Let’s talk a little about Batesville: It’s a small town.

Pretty sure it’s a little smaller than Brackettville. But, the land around it is suitable for crops, with a little irrigation. So, you have a lot of farming there. Very green. The last time we passed through it looked like they were growing either lettuce, spinach, or cabbage. Some kind of a leafy green. Like Brackettville, “main street” in the community also happens to be a highway. Further South, you have a lot of oil exploration and exploitation going on, so 18-wheelers are just coming and going all the time bulling their way through narrow one lane roads. If they’re not running freight up from Laredo to eventually head West on Highway 90 through Kinney County, they’re coming and going from the oil patch. Very busy, very dangerous, even without high-speed pursuits.

So, cancel the high-speed pursuits, some will say. If only it were so simple. That’s a midwit’s solution, guaranteed to ultimately make matters worse. There’s a reason the law insists that deaths that occur during the commission of some crime are ultimately the fault of the person committing the crime. No crime, no accidental death. A person made a decision, and that decision ended the way it ended. If stomping on the gas ensures you will get away with something, then everyone will simply stomp on the gas. See how that works? Pretty simple really.

But the truth is, there’s plenty more blame to go around. Mencias Escobar deserves most of it— but let’s be sure and save a whole bunch more for the Federal Government, which is torturing not only border residents and border states— but the whole damn country by now, as well as the human beings that are being brutalized by this disgrace they could end tomorrow. Don’t let anyone kid you— this is all the result of a small number of policy changes that were made almost on day 1 of the Biden Administration.

If the White House was serious, executive orders could go out the very next day, reversing all of this. Instead, we get goofy Kamala and goofy Joe mumbling “don’t come,” as if their hands were tied and this is inevitable.

They aren’t, and it isn’t. We are all of us the victims of a poor illusion.

“No no— South America and Central America are in upheaval— people are migrating because they have no choice!”

Lies.

South and Central America have endured much worse. Much much worse than anything going on right now. The proposition is laughable, and the only reason it has any traction at all is because so many people aren’t paying attention to either history or current events, and just want the news to be over so they can go back to the sportsball or whatever else they’d rather be anesthetizing themselves with.

The big difference between now, and past upheaval south of our borders is the constellation of federally funded NGO’s waiting to transport masses of people into the US, and a Federal Government that is conspiring to allow it.

Period. That’s the difference. That’s what’s changed.

The other incident that’s been getting a lot of attention is a nakedly obvious case of child smuggling disrupted in Kinney County by DPS troopers.

It happened back on the 3rd, but the news and video were released on the 10th.

Screenshot from X/twitter. Click on the link text “released” above to access and view the video.

Thankfully, these kinds of cases have been rare, compared to the vast majority of those coming through Kinney County. But, longtime readers of the newsletter probably remember past Dispatches where we pointed out the exceptions: All female loads— loads with children— there’s been more than just a couple.

As the legislature in Austin keeps waffling about— the house failing to have a quorum, etc, we find our thoughts traveling back to the annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio and a simple encounter reported first by the ultra-progressive Substack “The Border Chronicle,” 2 years ago.

Obviously, the Dispatch is coming from a different place— but the reporting from the Expo highlighted something that should inform everyone’s perspective of what’s happening in Austin and Washington D.C., and we bring it up again here because it really does help explain a lot of what we believe the dysfunction to be:

There are bright lights on the panel, where five men sit, including former Customs and Border Protection commissioner Robert Bonner and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Thomas Homan. It is dark in the audience, so it is difficult to see the man when he begins his question. He says he’s from South Texas, the Rio Grande Valley. He says his son is in the Border Patrol. He repeats a point that the panelists had made earlier, that cartels are making a lot of money on the other side of the border. But, he says, the expo floor here is filled with companies, so there are evidently a lot of people making money on this side of the border too.

“Why,” he asked, “would you even want a solution?” There is an audible hush in the audience and a prolonged silence among the panelists, many who themselves have gone through the DHS revolving door and now work for private companies (including Homan and Bonner). The pause goes on for so long that the man has to step forward to the microphone again and ask, “Would someone be able to address that question?”

—The Border Chronicle Substack, Todd Miller

We see this sort of dynamic everywhere today. Why cure a disease, when managing a condition is so much more profitable?

Why fix the border, when so many people stand to make so much money doing… anything but that?

We might disagree with The Border Chronicle on a lot of things, but it’s hard to argue against the idea that there are powerful vested interests that want things to go precisely the way they are.

It’s been a long 3 years. One hopes something big will change for the good before another three years pass us by.

Something has changed under the hood at Substack and we’ve picked up scads of new subscribers. Rather intimidating, as they arrive at a time when we’ve been struggling with the words. Struggling to say something new about what’s been happening.

We need to update the welcome email.

The newsletter began as a way to sort of examine what was happening from as neutral a perspective as we could muster. An open-minded attitude that was willing to consider that there might be a good reason for what was happening. For all we knew then, maybe there really was some kind of decent reason for what was happening.

But one can only play dumb for so long. After three years of this, three years of writing daily at first, and then weekly, it is impossible for us to pretend we haven’t drawn some sort of conclusions along the way.

Full disclosure— we’re employed by Kinney County, handling public information requests. The genesis of this newsletter predates said employment, however. It is maintained as separately from our duties at Kinney County as possible and is produced with zero oversight. Any errors, mistakes, or other misdeeds are entirely our own. We say all of this to remain in compliance with county policies on social media.

On that note, we’ll call it a morning. But before we leave you, a look back at a piece we wrote as the Haitian Crisis in Del Rio was peaking. It was a look at recent history in Haiti and represents an attempt at explaining some of the reasons Haitians were coming in such numbers. At the time, mainstream press was talking about an assassination attempt on the President of Haiti. We reckoned that the reasons were much more elemental than a mere assassination attempt.

We had 9 subscribers then. We have about 350 now, after almost zero self-promotional effort. Everyone here wants to be here, and found out about it from a friend, or their own diligent efforts to find more information, and that’s the way we like it. Most email newsletters are said to be doing well when they have a 30% open rate. The Dispatch is hovering at about 45% right about now.

It is difficult to verbalize how thrilled and intimidated we are by the fact that so many new friends and new neighbors are willing to read these words almost every time we publish. We once wrote for much larger audiences every night on local tv newscasts in Austin and other places— but this is incomparably more rewarding.

Thank you.

Please, take the time to read about Haiti and its dirt cookies. It’s a quick one. We’ll be back again soon: