Texas’s Eagle Pass voters turned to Trump. A year later, some have doubts

Along southern Texas, the Rio Grande forms the US-Mexico border, an arrangement established after the end of the Mexican-American war. Eagle Pass, which had been known as El Paso del Águila, became the first US settlement on the Rio Grande.

Swimming across the river has remained treacherous ever since. But migrants never stopped risking their lives to set foot on US soil – and in 2023, those numbers reach record highs as Eagle Pass, the seat of Maverick county, became the epicenter of growing backlash over the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

In 2024, for the first time in a century, the Hispanic-majority border county voted for a Republican: Donald Trump. Trump won 14 out of 18 counties along the southern border, gaining the most support there of any Republican in three decades. But he made his biggest gains in Maverick, with 59% of the votes, increasing his support by 14% from 2020.

While many supported Trump’s policies on border security, one year later some residents in Eagle Pass are increasingly uncomfortable with the tactics the administration has used across the country in keeping with its mass deportation agenda. Since Trump’s inauguration, federal agents have disrupted communities as they arrest parents who are with their children, show up at schools or daycare facilities, and accidentally sweep up US citizens.

The intensity of the national crackdown is jarring for residents like Manuel Mello III who have been on the frontlines of border issues for decades. The chief of the Eagle Pass fire department, Mello explained that border crossings have always been part of the city’s history.

Mello said his grandmother would pack food and water for those migrants that passed by. She would give them las bendiciones, or blessings in Spanish, and send them off. But what he saw at the Rio Grande in the last year of the Biden administration was unlike anything he had witnessed in his 33 years in the fire department.

“We would get between 30 to 60 emergency calls a day about migrants crossing the river with a lot of injuries, some with broken femurs or this lady who had an emergency childbirth,” Mello said.

In all 2024, the Eagle Pass fire department received more than 400 emergency calls and reported eight drownings. This year, the department has responded to fewer than 100 calls and reported only three drownings, according to numbers shared with the Guardian.

“Now Eagle Pass has gone back to normal, but this is still a broken system. Because you’re deporting people doesn’t mean that you’re fixing it,” Mello said.

A mile away, Ricardo Lopez and a group of friends gathered at a McDonald’s, as they do every week, to discuss some of the challenges facing Eagle Pass, a town in which 28,o00 people live.

Not long after ordering coffee, Lopez and his friends, all bilingual men of Mexican descent, realized it has been almost a year since the last elections. They remembered the evolution of what was then an extraordinary series of events: from thousands of migrants swimming across the Rio Grande each day to foreign journalists wandering the town’s streets and Texas national guard troops grabbing lunch at local restaurants.

Just hours after taking office for a second time, Trump signed an order declaring a national emergency that allowed additional US troops to arrive at the southern border. But Trump didn’t only try to cut down on illegal immigration. The administration also terminated a mobile phone app created under Biden known as CBP One, which had allowed tens of thousands of people waiting in Mexico to cross into the US legally and apply for asylum.

Since then, residents like Lopez have seen a dramatic change in Eagle Pass.

At the height of the spike in migration in December of 2023, the border patrol recorded over 2,300 crossings a day in the Del Rio sector, home to Eagle Pass. In September of this year, it averaged just 30 crossings a day there, government data shows.

Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics project, a nonpartisan polling initiative by the University of Texas at Austin, said Maverick county was a reflection of broader political dynamics in the state, where Republicans were seeking to expand their appeal in blue-collar areas, including among Latinos.

“Texas is a changing competitive landscape and more diverse than the country as a whole. If you try to appeal to Hispanics based on their Hispanicness, you might be missing the mark. And I think Democrats have probably failed in engaging with this group of people,” Blank said.

Shortly after Biden entered the White House, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, had also launched Operation Lone Star in a bid to deter illegal immigration. The effort quickly raised concerns about its tactics, including the busing of thousands of migrants to Chicago, New York and Washington DC.

As part of the initiative, an 80-acre base camp was built in Eagle Pass to house 1,800 Texas national guard soldiers. Troops deployed there by Texas and other Republican-led states have been seen standing on the US side of the border setting up coils of razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande, ordering migrants to swim back to Mexico.

Texas says Operation Lone Star had led to more than 500,000 apprehensions of undocumented people.

On a recent afternoon, the Guardian observed armed Texas national guard troops walking and watching over the US-Mexico border atop shipping containers. No migrants were seen crossing the river from Mexico. In Piedras Negras, there wasn’t razor wire preventing access to the Rio Grande.

While the migration dynamics have changed at the border, some longtime residents are not just concerned about the impact on people. They’re also worried about the degradation of the environment as a result of Trump and Abbott’s crackdown.

Abbott used a natural disaster declaration to install floating buoys separated by saw-blades in the river as a part of Operation Lone Star. Shortly after, Jessie Fuentes, the owner of a kayaking company in Eagle Pass, filed a lawsuit, seeking to stop the installation of floating barriers.

“The river was part of my grandfather’s upbringing, my father’s upbringing and mine, more than 200 years of experience as a family, and now it’s been mistreated with this militarization,” said Fuentes.

“The river can’t defend itself so I sued the Texas government.”