AUSTIN — Mexican officials clarified Friday that the Honduran migrant found dead near the buoy barrier Texas installed in the Rio Grande is not a child, as initially reported, but a 20-year-old man. He was one of two people whose bodies were spotted near Eagle Pass two days earlier, the first deaths linked to the buoys ordered by Gov. Greg Abbott that critics decry as “barbaric.”
“No good person would do this,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at his daily news conference Thursday. “This is inhumane, and no person should be treated like this.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety denied that either migrant died by getting entangled in barriers Texas installed in recent weeks.
”The Mexican government is flat-out wrong,” Abbott spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said. “Unfortunately, drownings in the Rio Grande by people attempting to cross illegally are all too common.”
In Washington, the Department of Homeland Security called the deaths “heartbreaking” and called for an investigation.
Mexico’s foreign ministry announced the deaths near Eagle Pass — the first linked to the new 1,000-foot barriers — on Wednesday. A Mexican diplomat and a worker at the migrant shelter where the mother was staying in Piedras Negras, across the river from Eagle Pass, described the fatality from Honduras as a boy.
The mother, sobbing on local TV that night, said she recognized her son from his T-shirt and shoes.
On Friday, Mexico’s foreign ministry clarified that the mother said her son was about 20, and recognized him from his tattoos. The attorney general’s office of Coahuila state was trying to confirm his identity through fingerprints.
Roughly 3 miles downstream another person’s body was spotted, caught in the barrier that critics have called “death traps” sure to cause tragedy in the name of security.
Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw said that victim was already dead when he got stuck.
“Preliminary information suggests this individual drowned upstream from the marine barrier and floated into the buoys,” he said in a statement. “There are personnel posted at the marine barrier at all times in case any migrants try to cross.”
Mexican officials said Friday they don’t know the name or nationality of that person. Authorities found no identity papers and no relative or anyone else has stepped forward.
“The governor has the blood of a child and others on his hands,” U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, asserted Thursday, when Mexican authorities were still saying the migrant from Honduras was a child.
Calling the barriers “barbaric,” U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, said Abbott’s “barrel traps have caused an asylum seeker to drown. The Texas Governor is knowingly trying to injure, maim and kill migrants seeking asylum in the United States with razor wire and drowning devices.”
Castro will lead a group of U.S. House members Tuesday “to see the deadly razor wire and buoys” around Eagle Pass and meet with local residents and officials.
At Casa Dignidad, a migrant shelter in Piedras Negras, Sister Isabel Turcios also chastised the governor.
“Abbott’s buoys are like a trap set for migrants,” she said. “This is a terrorizing situation. You don’t stop migration by setting death traps. … You treat humans like human beings, not like animals.”
But Mahaleris, the governor’s spokesman, noted that four migrants drowned in the river in early July, before the barriers were installed, and pointed to a United Nations report that deemed the U.S.-Mexico border the deadliest land crossing in the world in 2021, Biden’s first year in office.
All of these deaths, he asserted, stem from “the reckless open border policies of President Biden and President López Obrador. ... If [they] truly cared about human life, they would do their jobs and secure the border.”
The Biden administration has lambasted Abbott, accusing him of callous disregard for migrant safety on top of brazen violation of federal laws and treaties, and overstepping state authority.
“This report is heartbreaking, and the circumstances should be thoroughly investigated,” said Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Erin Heeter. “It is critical that we manage our border in a safe and humane way that respects the dignity of every human being and keeps our communities safe. We can both enforce our laws and treat human beings with dignity.”
Announcing the barriers in June, Abbott said the goal was to stop migrants from considering crossing the river. He has defended the hazard the buoys might pose by noting that migrants don’t risk drowning if they only cross at official points of entry.
“Nobody drowns on a bridge,” the governor wrote last month to President Joe Biden, rejecting a Justice Department demand to remove the barriers.
Construction began four weeks ago as the latest escalation in Abbott’s $10 billion border security effort dubbed Operation Lone Star, which includes deployments of state troopers and the National Guard.
On July 24, the Justice Department asked a federal court to order Texas to remove the barriers, arguing they were installed without the permits required before construction in a navigable waterway. The judge has not yet ruled on the request.
The barriers comprise buoys 4-feet in diameter, strung together in lengths of 1,000 feet. They are not wrapped in razor wire as early reports indicated, but there are sharp metal strips between each one, ensuring cuts for anyone who might try to climb through the narrow gap.
“This tragic loss is the inevitable result of Greg Abbott’s cruel, dangerous border policies that disregard human life,” U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas said Thursday. “Drowning desperate migrants and their children is not the solution to our immigration problems.”
On Wednesday, Mexico’s Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena said DPS had alerted the consulate in Eagle Pass that a dead person was found stuck to the nearby barrier.
DPS spokesman Travis Considine echoed that version of events, saying the agency received a report “of a possible drowning victim floating upstream from the marine barrier. DPS then notified U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Mexican Consulate. Later that day a body was discovered at the marine barrier.”
The Mexican foreign ministry later reported the discovery of the second body, the Honduran migrant, upriver. DPS officials said Thursday they weren’t aware of that second death.
It’s unclear how either person died.
Apart from the buoys, which are anchored to the riverbed, Texas has placed about 60 miles of razor wire along its bank of the Rio Grande.
Bárcena reiterated Mexico’s complaint that the buoys violate her country’s sovereignty and pose a threat to human rights and migrant safety.
Mexico and the U.S. State Department both deem the barriers installed by Texas a violation of treaties the two countries signed in 1944 and 1970.
The federal government has sole authority over foreign affairs and U.S. immigration policy, and is also responsible for border security.
Abbott and other conservatives say Biden’s weak enforcement policies have left the border wide open, justifying state action to fill the vacuum.
.@GovAbbott's illegal, barbaric, and inhumane border policies does not reflect our Texan values.
— Rep. Sylvia Garcia (@RepSylviaGarcia) August 3, 2023
He must put a stop to this before more lives are lost!
Read my statement below ⬇ pic.twitter.com/wdurbsAQhx
Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, called the deaths “the inevitable outcome of Greg Abbott’s godless actions. ... This is a dark day for Texas ... and I am deeply ashamed as a Texan.”
In El Paso, on the grim anniversary of a 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart by a gunman who targeted Hispanics and killed 23 people, local leaders and victims’ relatives denounced Abbott’s border efforts.
“The situation in Texas, the rhetoric, policies, are worse today than they were four years ago,” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of Border Network of Human Rights, an immigrant rights group, asserting that Abbott’s vehemence has stoked hate and “fear” against “the others.”
“It’s clear today that racism and white supremacy are more than words. This is part of the everyday narrative in Texas. It killed people in El Paso, and now we have two more migrants dead in Eagle Pass because of the strategy and policies of the governor,” he said.
In a letter to Abbott and the Justice Department this week, El Paso county commissioners condemned the state’s border security efforts near Eagle Pass.
“This is horrible, a horrific concern that literally turns my stomach,” Commissioner Sergio Coronado said.
