UVALDE, Texas — More than a week after the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, one thing is clear: The heightened security surrounding this town near the border ultimately didn’t stop a homegrown shooter from inflicting terror on the community.
As the investigation continues into the flawed response of law enforcement during the massacre, elected officials and residents say the examination must also look at whether the state’s outsize focus on border security has diminished its ability to deal with other threats.
This small, tight-knit city of about 16,000 between San Antonio and the Texas-Mexico border, some 65 miles away, is crawling with local, state and federal law enforcement officers who live and work here, generally to stop drugs and migrants from entering the United States.
Instead, border agents responded last month to Robb Elementary School, where 19 children and two teachers were killed. Another 17 people were wounded.
Before the shooting, many residents said they felt Uvalde was “hardly on the map.”
Across roughly eight square miles are single-family homes and local businesses. The west side is poor and the east side is more prosperous, remnants of a segregated past that haunts residents. There’s one H-E-B grocery store, one Starbucks and a post office. It has a city council of five, a police force of 16.
Vast ranches, big skies and empty fields create the only space between one law enforcement agency and the next, including the Texas Department of Public Safety and a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol checkpoint set to open soon.
Along the border there are some 10,000 Texas National Guard members. Of those, about 6,400 are deployed in border counties, while the rest are in support roles elsewhere, according to testimony in April from department leaders. There are also about 1,600 DPS officers supporting Operation Lone Star, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott launched in March 2021.
Operation Lone Star has already cost the state about $4 billion since it began and the DPS has paid at least $68 million in overtime to officers sent to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Agency leaders have previously testified that as many as 1,600 of the department’s 4,200 officers are stationed there at any given time. Of the roughly $180 million the agency spent on their overtime from March 2021 through February, nearly 40% covered the border push.
In that time period — the first year of Operation Lone Star — state records show the DPS spent more on extra hours than almost any other agency.
Last year, the state’s top leaders redirected hundreds of millions of dollars from other agencies to fund thousands of Texas Army National Guard members on the border.
Abbott’s office has helped the DPS plug budget holes in the past. The governor’s office funneled the agency over $30 million in grants last year to cover border operations from June through August, Abbott spokeswoman Renae Eze said in a statement.
In January, the Uvalde News-Leader reported Uvalde’s police department received a grant of its own: $532,000 from Operation Lone Star.
The grant was in addition to the department’s $4 million budget — just under 40% of the city’s general fund.
Agencies work together
Uvalde is part of the Del Rio sector of Border Patrol. In recent months, this sector has been in the spotlight as a growing number of migrants cross the border at Eagle Pass.
In border areas, law enforcement agencies often work together, as they did during the Uvalde shooting. But at times it can seem like almost all eyes are trained toward stopping illegal immigration, officials said.
On the border in Del Rio, Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, a former DPS trooper, agrees with the call to redefine priorities — to a certain extent. Following the mass shooting, his office sent eight members to help in Uvalde and immediately held meetings with community stakeholders and pressed for more officers.
“The more officers we have to protect our community, the better off we are,” he said, adding that he’s requested up to eight more officers in a community of about 48,000. Del Rio has 25 patrol officers. “On border security, we’re going to stand by our federal partners, but at the same time, I need to keep my community safe and my citizens safe.”
Border security, he added, is a federal responsibility, but “the system is broken,” pointing to the increase of migrants that crossed last year through Del Rio and the latest push rush of migrants — about 6,000 per week — through nearby Eagle Pass this year.
“Bottom line we need immigration reform but there has been no political will in Washington” for decades so the burden falls on communities like Del Rio, Uvalde and the state governor to step in, said Martinez, a four-term sheriff and staunch Democrat.
As for Abbott, Martinez said, the criticism “can pull either direction. Yes, we do need to find a better balance between border security and community safety, but he’s trying to protect the state of Texas … And yet we can’t afford to have what happened in Uvalde happen in our community of Del Rio. This is not so black-and-white issue.”
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, who represents Uvalde, pointed directly at the governor, telling The Dallas Morning News that Abbott “created chaos along the border.”
Gutierrez calls Abbott’s statements that the border is being overrun by migrants “fictitious” and the array of National Guard members and DPS agents protecting the border “props” designed to get Abbott reelected.
“He’s presumably handing out traffic tickets and picking up migrants walking down the street; he’s sending them to Dilley,” referring to the largest immigrant detention center in South Texas, “or busing them to Washington, D.C., for political stunts,” he said. “Does he ever think, maybe, we should do some joint training with the locals on active shooter training?”
Rosie Ruiz, 63, a longtime resident who decades ago attended Robb Elementary School, witnessed parents screaming outside asking the police to go in.
“What are you waiting for? Go in. Save our children,” Ruiz recalled the screams from parents.
“When we needed them, they were cowards,” Ruiz said. “If we don’t wake up now, when can we? We have to honor these children by changing things, by holding these people accountable.”
Ultimately, though, it wasn’t school police, or local officers, or the DPS, but the federal government — U.S. Border Patrol officers — who became the town’s heroes on the day of the massacre.
According to a Border Patrol spokesperson, four officers formed a so-called stack and entered the classroom. One was holding a shield and three discharged their weapons, though it is unclear which struck and killed the shooter.
Resources pour in
In the aftermath of the shooting, the state has pledged to put more resources in Uvalde, with an emphasis on mental health.
Abbott declared Uvalde a disaster area, which will allow quicker access to the funding. The Texas Department of Emergency Management will provide a family resource center for Uvalde residents seeking help with mental health and other needs.
For Gutierrez, it’s not nearly enough.
“You know, if I’m the governor of this state, I’d come down with my pocketbook,” Gutierrez said. “But he doesn’t have the fortitude to do the right thing. He only wants to come down here and promise little, and do nothing. Do something, man.”
State Rep. James White, R-Houston, is chairman of the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee. He defends Operation Lone Star, but said the focus now shouldn’t be “quibbling” about politics and instead use the energy on ensuring this doesn’t happen again.
“It’s not a question of balancing at this point, but about meeting the challenges and expectations in Uvalde and exceeding the expectations in our investigation about what happened in that community — what went wrong — so this doesn’t happen again,” said White.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, a Republican, is a strong supporter of Operation Lone Star. He told KSAT-TV that DPS troopers “have been a godsend for our community.” He’s appeared multiple times on Fox News to decry what he calls Biden’s open-border policies. He’s also criticized Abbott, for not building the border wall.
McLaughlin did not respond to an interview request.
Pain of failures
According to Steven McCraw, head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, one hour and 20 minutes elapsed between the first call to 911 and Border Patrol officers finally confronting the shooter, who had fired at least 142 rounds in the school.
The pain for the community is unfathomable. Grieving residents continue to form lines to place fresh flowers at makeshift memorials that seem to spring up daily.
Manuel Garza said he lost two nieces in the massacre, and blames “(former President Donald) Trump for lighting the match that hasn’t been put out to this day. All this talk about criminals this, criminals that, Mexicans this, Mexicans that shifted the attention from our community to the border.”
Lori Contreras, who lives near Robb Elementary School, added: “Everything is about border security, save us from (migrants), protect us from them, but immigrants are coming to work, not to murder us ... Where were they (law enforcement) when we needed them the most? We feel abandoned.”
Daniel Alvarez, 54, is blunt: If things do not change in Uvalde, the town is in danger.
“The town it’s going to change and the cops that were wrong are going to be nickeled (worthless), and they’re gonna give up when they bring in new people,” Alvarez said. “It’s gonna change like when 9/11 changed everything, for this town this is going to change everything.”
But change won’t come easily, Contreras said, because residents “don’t vote, we don’t participate.”
There has not been a year since 1988 that more than 64% of registered voters in Uvalde County turned out to vote. The year with the highest turnout, 1988, was 63.5%. The lowest, 2014, was only 31.5%.
For the past 17 years, the average was 47.6%.
“That has to change, because you see the result of these empty promises,” said Contreras.
Of those who do vote, about 60% in the 2020 presidential election favored Trump, who campaigned on a promise to build a wall along the border.
“When things are going smoothly for so long, people don’t think about switching up their leadership,” said Wanda Bingham, who grew up in Uvalde and graduated from the local high school, as she placed yellow roses in a new makeshift memorial along Main Street. “But this tragedy has forced them to confront the reality that in the end, they hold the power.”
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(Staff writers Allie Morris and Imelda Garcia contributed to this report.)
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