Authored by Darlene McCormick Sanchez via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
BRACKETTVILLE, Texas—The chaos caused by millions of illegal immigrants flooding across the southwest border under the Biden administration left scars on this border town.
The constant high-speed chases, buzzing helicopters, screaming emergency sirens, hurried school lockdowns, torn barbed-wire fences, and decomposing bodies on ranches and along the Rio Grande all took their toll on Texas towns near the Mexican border.
The border crisis drained resources and changed the lifestyle of Brackettville, a little town with two traffic light intersections in Kinney County. Residents of the county and beyond said the madness stopped almost overnight after President Donald Trump took office.
Now they say the chaos of illegal immigration has just moved into the country’s interior to places that include Minnesota.
Illegal border crossings plummeted to record lows after Trump took office. In fiscal year 2025, Customs and Border Protection reported 443,000 encounters at the southwest border with Mexico.
In 2024, that number stood at a little less than 2.5 million.
‘Back to Mayberry’
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 people per year moved through the county in 2022 and 2023.
Images of illegal immigrants were caught on game cameras meant to give ranchers photos of deer and wildlife on their property, which allowed Coe to estimate the traffic.
“If we hadn’t stepped up when we did in the way we did—I think it would totally destroy the county, had the wave of illegal immigrants continued,” he told The Epoch Times.
Brackettville sits north of the Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. Route 57 past Eagle Pass and west of the Uvalde checkpoint, making it an ideal location for gotaways, or illegal immigrants who evade capture.
“It’s really a geographical thing with the checkpoint locations to some degree,” Brent Smith, Kinney County attorney, told The Epoch Times.
The area attracted state and national attention as a hot spot for high-speed chases involving smugglers during the border crisis.
The depth of the problem along the smuggling corridor was the subject of an Epoch Times documentary: “Gotaways: The Hidden Border Crisis.”
But now, ranchers are not spending all their time repairing fences, picking up dumpsters full of discarded water bottles and clothing, or worrying about who might walk out of the brush.
They no longer have to black out their windows in fear that the light will attract unwanted nighttime visitors. Families are once again accompanying hunters to their deer leases, Smith said.
“So, it’s kind of back to Mayberry,” Coe told The Epoch Times, referring to the idyllic small town featured in the 1960s TV series “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Matt Benacci, a school board member for Brackett Independent School District, said life has returned to normal at the district’s K–12 campuses as well.
School lockdowns have all but stopped, he told The Epoch Times.
During the border crisis, schools would sometimes have to lock down two times per day because of smugglers bailing out of vehicles and running on foot through the town, he said.
A car of gotaways once jumped the curb onto school grounds and the occupants fled, and one illegal immigrant tried the gym doors to get inside the school, he said.
Brackett Independent School District placed giant stones along the perimeter of its schools to serve as barricades to protect against future incidents.
Those kinds of chases turned deadly for residents because it sapped their town’s resources.
Smith recalls two instances during the mass migration in which Kinney County residents suffered life-threatening medical emergencies when their resources were dispatched to crashes involving smugglers.
“If we have, like, a huge crash or pursuit, 20 miles, 25 miles north of town, all of our resources are out there,” he said.
If an ambulance had been available on a fateful day in 2024, perhaps Benacci’s mother might still be alive.
“I try not to dwell on it because the only thing you can do is get really angry,” Benacci said, his voice breaking, eyes pricking with tears.
Gloria Benacci, who was in her 70s, died two years ago after suffering a stroke, he said.
The local ambulance crew was not available because it was responding to a deadly crash involving illegal immigrants. Likewise, rescue helicopters were tied up, he recalled.
State troopers chased a vehicle containing a U.S. citizen and several illegal immigrants in early March 2024. The vehicle rolled over, throwing people from the truck. Four died.
With local emergency services tied up, an ambulance from Uvalde, about 40 miles away, was dispatched for Benacci’s mother and arrived in about an hour.
It took another couple of hours to get her to a hospital in San Antonio. She never recovered the ability to breathe on her own, he said, and she passed away on March 13, 2024.
“Once an ambulance is dispatched out there to something like that, you can’t divert them to something else,” he said, referring to the illegal immigrant crash.
Larger border cities were not spared, either.
In Eagle Pass, Fire Chief Manuel Mello said his department received as many as six calls per day for drownings along the Rio Grande in 2022. In 2025, the number dropped to about six for the entire year, he said.
Now, emergency calls to the Rio Grande and those involving foreign nationals have dropped by 95 percent, he said.
“Once the new administration came in, things started to slow down significantly,” he said. “We were getting calls almost every day to the river’s edge, and right now, I don’t think we’ve had one call in the last two, three months.”
Things were so bad for a while that he had a designated crew just for responding to calls to the river’s edge. It would get multiple calls and, at times, get overwhelmed, he said.
People trying to ride the trains into the United States often incurred horrific injuries or death, he said. Many had their limbs crushed or amputated in the doors that would slide shut as the train moved.
“We were seeing a lot of amputations, a lot of decapitations, a lot of injuries,” he said.
Mass migration strained the entire medical system, he said. Emergency medical services and the hospital system were overwhelmed, according to him.
“There was a point where we were waiting 45 minutes to an hour outside, waiting for a bed,” he said. “So right now, I guess my guys are breathing a little easier.”
Border Scars
Wanda Selby, 88, said she no longer feels the need to carry her Smith and Wesson .38 revolver when she goes on walks with her dog, Lady.
“They’re just not coming through like they were,” she told The Epoch Times as she ambled among the towering live oaks in Red Bridge Park.
Selby told The Epoch Times that in 2022, she decided to forgo her frequent walks alone after striking up a conversation with a young Texas highway patrolman.
He was parked along a rural road near a friend’s ranch where she liked to walk. The lawman told her that a .38 would not help her because human smugglers, or coyotes, working for the Mexican cartels carried AK-47s.
“‘You don’t want to let anybody know you have a gun, because they have a bigger gun,’” she recalled him saying.
She opted to walk in her neighborhood afterward.
In 2022 and 2023, it was common to hear helicopters buzzing overhead in her neighborhood. Sometimes illegal immigrants on the run would come onto people’s porches, she recalled.
Border Patrol agents and state troopers frequently combed her neighborhood.
“It was a nightmare down here,” she said. “[Former President Joe] Biden, he didn’t just let them in—he welcomed murderers, drug dealers, anybody that wanted to come in. They were not vetted at the border.”
Damage to Ranches
Ben Binnion, 39, is a wildlife biologist who manages thousands of acres of ranchland outside of Eagle Pass across from the Mexican border.
Beginning in 2021, the ranch became a superhighway for human traffickers, suffering at least $350,000 in damages, he said.
Many illegal immigrants would walk around the checkpoint east of Eagle Pass, with some using Farm Road 481, which is near the ranch, to head north.
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