Grumet: Abbott's razor wire nightmare tears into migrants and Texas values

A woman and her three daughters recently made the harrowing trek from Colombia to El Paso — braving the nightmarish jungles of the Darién Gap, traveling more than 3,000 miles across a half-dozen countries, facing the constant danger of assault and robbery, all to flee a homeland torn by militias that rape and traffic women at will.

When the family reached the outskirts of El Paso, behind them stood suffering, starvation and death. Ahead of them stood our border wall.

They scaled the wall.

“That razor wire and that (border) wall, at that point, is not much of a deterrent,” said Fraser Mooney, executive director of Doctors of the World USA, which runs an El Paso clinic that treated the woman for a fractured foot. Mooney said the woman and her daughters applied for asylum and are awaiting their court date.

“People tell us their stories,” he said, “and they're fleeing desperate conditions.”

I kept thinking about that amid the Houston Chronicle’s horrifying revelations last week about the brutality of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. In a state where politicians tout family values and the sanctity of life, troopers near Eagle Pass were told to push a group of exhausted migrants, including children and nursing babies, back into the river toward Mexico (thankfully, the troopers refused to do so).

A father suffered a deep gash on his leg while extricating his son from a barrel in the river wrapped in barbed wire. Troopers found a woman doubled over in pain, suffering a miscarriage while tangled in the razor wire that Abbott proudly ordered across “mile after mile after mile” of Texas’ southern border.

These injuries were inflicted on our turf, with our tax dollars, because ruthless bravado at the border is a winning formula for Texas Republicans. We want Chuck Norris solutions to intractable problems. Yet, to our shame, we have compounded the suffering of deeply desperate people, and Texans are no safer for it.

Surely migrants expect to find walls and barbed wire and armed soldiers on the U.S. side of the border. They come anyway. Those threats pale in comparison to the horrors they’re fleeing.

Abbott’s office issued a lengthy statement defending his signature border security mission. "No orders or directions have been given under Operation Lone Star that would compromise the lives of those attempting to cross the border illegally,” he said.

Yet that’s impossible to square with the very tools Abbott has deployed at our border.

Razor wire is designed to tear flesh, not merely “snag clothing,” as the governor’s statement incredibly suggested. The Department of Public Safety medic who raised concerns about migrants’ injuries noted that the razor wire stretches across vast unlit areas, so at night, people “stumble into it as a trap.” He also noted that five people had drowned near Eagle Pass in one week, as the razor wire barriers sent migrants toward more dangerous places to cross.

Meanwhile, the wall of bright orange buoys strung across the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass blocks a more passable stretch of the river, which could push the most desperate migrants into more treacherous waters. By design, it endangers lives.

That is not to say we should be a nation of open borders. But for far too long, we have deployed militaristic tools to address a humanitarian crisis. Rather than hoist more dangerous barriers against people determined to make risky crossings, we need a comprehensive overhaul of our immigration system.

Yes, we need officers at the border to turn away people not authorized to be here, especially criminals trafficking drugs or weapons. But we also need for the federal government to create a viable, timely path for people to request asylum, seek temporary work or aspire to U.S. citizenship.

Ideally, we need a state government that looks for ways to cooperate with the feds on a challenge this massive, mindful of the fact that border security is a federal responsibility, and both layers of government serve the same taxpayers. I know that sounds hopelessly idealistic, given Abbott’s blasting of President Joe Biden’s “border chaos” and Texas’ installation of buoy barriers without federal approval (the feds are now threatening to sue).

But at some point, I hope voters stop asking themselves who’s tougher on the border and start considering who’s working to make things better. Unrolling razor wire by the mile is plenty tough but clearly ineffective — and worse, inhumane.

When I asked Mooney at Doctors of the World what advice he would have for policymakers, he went straight to the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.”

“We need to treat people as human beings, regardless of what their status is,” he added.

We saw that compassion in the now-famous email from the DPS medic.

"I truly believe in the mission of Operation Lone Star; I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane," trooper Nicholas Wingate wrote to a DPS sergeant. "We need to operate it correctly in the eyes of God. We need to recognize that these are people who are made in the image of God and need to be treated as such."

I pray our governor is listening.

Grumet is the Statesman’s Metro columnist. Her column, ATX in Context, contains her opinions. Share yours via email at bgrumet@statesman.com or via Twitter at @bgrumet. Find her previous work at statesman.com/news/columns.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Grumet: Abbott's razor wire tears into migrants and Texas values