Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Del Rio Days
The New York Times has done a great job of covering the current border crisis, particularly the entry of Haitians in and around Del Rio, Texas. It's a perplexing situation-- we don't expect people from a Caribbean island to be sneaking into the US over the Rio Grande. But there they are. And it seems that we aren't handling it very well.
I used to go to Del Rio fairly regularly, to train the defense bar there on changes to the federal sentencing guidelines (this was back when there actually were changes to the sentencing guidelines-- we haven't had a functioning US Sentencing Commission since 2018 because of lack of a quorum). I would drive from Waco down to to San Antonio and then out into the empty spaces. I loved the drive, actually-- it was such a different part of the world than I had ever seen, endless scrublands with tiny, gray and brown towns here and there.
Del Rio was fascinating to me. It is a small city, with a population of about 35,000. A lot of the economy comes from two federal facilities: the courthouse and a big air base (Laughlin) outside of town. I tried to spend the night there, and usually would walk over the bridge (it is not a very big bridge) over into Mexico for dinner with some of the local defense bar. To me, that was unbelievably exotic-- to walk over a little river into a dusty Mexican town with a bunch of wickedly smart people who spoke Spanish and seemed to fit right in (I did not). I did not like the justice that was meted out in the courthouse, though. It seemed geared towards high volumes rather than due process, and I often saw lawyers representing people in groups of twelve or more.
I was a stranger in a strange land, but one with a car and relative wealth and American citizenship. I can't imagine what it is like to have none of those things, hiding under that bridge, hoping not to be sent back to a place devastated by political tumult, an earthquake and a hurricane. But there they are.
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What is perplexing is how they all found out about the new Haitian immigration policy and were able to hightail it from South and Central America so quickly. These Haitians haven't lived in Haiti for almost 10 years. They fled after the last big earthquake in Haiti. According to a news report I watched last night, a month ago there were about 100 people near or under that bridge, now over 7,000.
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