CBP Launches Major Operation in Texas to Catch Covid-Sickened Illegal Immigrants Entering From Mexico

One of two quiet new moves to staunch the unacknowledged flow of Covid patients crossing the border

In quiet acknowledgement that significant numbers of Covid-infected patients are crossing from Mexico and boosting infection and hospitalization rates in border states, the Trump White House and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have mounted two major initiatives to staunch Mexico’s export of the disease.

The first started Thursday with no fanfare or public announcement. CBP began a surge operation along the Texas border to catch and remove far more illegal immigrants crossing who are infected with Covid-19 from reaching the nation’s interior, two knowledgeable agency sources confirmed to the Center for Immigration Studies. One CBP official said re-deployments of more than 400 and possibly as many as 1,000 CBP agents from the nation’s interior would be committed to apprehending illegal migrants who would otherwise evade Border Patrol — known as “got-aways” in Border Patrol parlance — for the purpose of catching and returning to Mexico those who otherwise would go on to infect interior Latino populations.

While cyclical redeployment surge operations are not unusual in normal times, this one is very much so in that its main intent, according to a second CBP official, is to “mitigate public health impacts on the American public amid the ongoing global pandemic” and to counter “the Covid-19 public health risk posed if these illegal entry attempts continue unabated.”

The operation will involve two 30-day deployments in two south Texas Border Patrol sectors, Laredo and Rio Grande Valley, where hospitals have been overwhelmed with seriously ill Covid patients since June. Immediately across the Rio Grande from Texas cities in those sectors (including Brownsville, McAllen, and Laredo), hospitals in the Mexican cities of Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo have all but collapsed at the same time under the crush of Mexican Covid patients. The hospital bed crisis in Texas has forced those facilities along the border to ship patients by fixed-wing aircraft as far away as Amarillo and Dallas and by fleets of ambulances to facilities in Houston, San Antonio and to rural community hospitals across the large state.

The new CBP operation confirms a phenomenon that senior government officials, the media, and pandemic experts have studiously avoided addressing publicly for weeks about sharp Covid spikes in border states like Texas: that significant numbers of illegal immigrants crossing to work in the country’s black market economy are sick with Covid-19. Border Patrol agents have taken some seriously sick Mexican illegal migrants to area hospitals but, for the most part, have returned about 90 percent of those apprehended under the emergency health provision known as “Title 42.”

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