By James Moore
“No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark” (Warsan Shire, author).
Only a week had passed since we had moved into an adobe duplex about ten minutes north of the Rio Grande. Our new neighbors were a young couple with a five-year-old son, Shane. The name was a tad culturally askew from Antonio and Angelica, raised and naturalized along the river. I never knew, and did not ask, what Antonio did for a living until I saw him leave early one morning, wearing a greenish-brown border patrol uniform. I had the mistaken notion of a young man that such a job had pay sufficient to afford housing that exceeded our fading adobe with its nighttime cockroaches in the corners.
Antonio was neither talkative, nor gregarious. He and his wife had Hollywood looks and I assumed they moved in social circles that belied their apparent $175-a-month rental circumstances. We rarely said hello in passing, but after about a month he stopped me on our shared porch, and asked a question.
“You said you work on the radio, right?”
“Yeah, the old AM station, just down the highway there. You can see the tower.” I pointed between the palm trees.
“You do the news, no?” Antonio looked around, I thought, fearful of being seen talking to a reporter, as if a stranger might recognize a small-town radio newscaster and a neophyte border patrol agent.
“I do,” I said. “Why, do you know of a news story I need to report?”
“Maybe.” Antonio looked away, down the street, a kind of poor man’s boulevard with palms scattered in ditches and along curbs. “We see things, on patrol, ya know? I think sometimes, people need to know more about it.”
“Not sure what you’re talking about,” I said. “But if you have a good news story one of these days, call me at the radio station. I’ll write my direct line number on a piece of paper, and leave it in your screen later.’
“Okay, thanks. Maybe I never will, but I think I might,” he said.
The day Antonio called, I had just finished my last newscast of the morning. I picked up the hotline, and recognized the slight accent and resonance of his voice.
“Hey, can you come down to the river?”
“Yeah, I just got off the air. What’s up? Something happening?”
“No, it’s already happened, but you need to see it.”
I followed his directions along the levee and upriver from the bridge across the Rio Grande into Reynosa, Mexico. My old car squeaked and whined along the bumps until I reached a clearing next to the canebrakes. Antonio stepped out from behind the tall, green shoots, possibly the remnants of an old sugar cane farm, and waved me over, as if he had been waiting and watching me bounce down the levee.
“What is it? What’s going on?” I was anxious to know what his story might be and if I could get it on the radio before any other reporters discovered its likely importance.
“They’re down here,” Antonio said. “We’re trying to recover now. I wish you had a camera.”
I was glad, later, that I did not. He led me to a path along the riverbank that was trampled and slick with mud. We slid part of the way towards the water and stopped at a flat spot below the stands of cane.
“This is where they come up out of the river,” Antonio said. “Then they go into the cane and hide, wait for night, and try to jump a train or get a ride out on Highway 83, if they can get those few miles north without getting caught. Come on, just a little bit farther.”
The path narrowed and we ducked into a short tunnel through the thick vegetation and stepped back into the tropical heat and onto a wide, flat pan of dry earth where a half dozen other border patrol agents were leaning out over the water. One of them was working a long pole, dipping it in and out of the muddy river as if he were trying to spear fish.
“What are all these agents doing here?” I asked.
“Trying to recover them.”
“Recover what?”
“Agents mostly call them floaters. I call them people. You might want to hold your nose.”
Three figures, dark and bloated by gas, bounced on the water in a tangle of roots on the north bank of the big river. They were only marginally recognizable as human remains, the flesh blackened by decay. Ropes, wrapped around the larger body were tied to the two smaller remains of little humans, and they drifted back into each other in a sad, almost rhythmic movement.
“We’re pretty sure that’s a mother in the middle,” Antonio said. “She appears to have tied a rope around her waist and then her two children to keep them from getting separated as they went into the river. No idea where that was, but they’ve been in the water several days. She may not have even been able to swim.”
I was at a gathering Edinburg this past Friday of 350 community and business leaders, examining the 2026 economic outlook for the four counties at the lower end of the river. A presentation by the Vice President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Pia Orrenius, showed them data that, once more, the only dynamic holding the region back is politics and misguided, uninformed national leadership. Mexico’s exports to the U.S. went up, even with tariffs and threats of more tariffs, and the residential housing industry was booming, until ICE was unleashed and chased away or detained much of the labor force. Leadership of the Valley’s residential construction groups has been in Washington pleading with the White House to find a solution that provides the needed labor.
The argument to “just hire legal workers” becomes facile when considering the fact they simply do not exist in an adequate number for a booming border economy. If policy makers were truly interested in stopping illegal immigration, they would consider making it a felony for any company that hires an undocumented worker. Punish business operators with detention, time behind bars. Such a law, of course, would have a profoundly dire effect on the Texas, and national, economies. There probably are not many houses built in the past 25 years in this state that have not employed workers without documents. They construct houses, cook food in restaurants, mow and landscape yards, drive the trucks that deliver groceries and perishable products, pick the cantaloupes in the Pecos River Valley, the strawberries in Poteet, the peaches in Fredericksburg, and the watermelons in Luling. In Texas, and much of the rest of the country, profits and progress have often been built on the backs of immigrants.
And now, we are chasing them away.
This article was originally published on Texas to the world.
James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).
His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.
Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”
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Perhaps many immigrants are descended from dispossessed owners of long ago. Much of this pustular USA region was “stolen” from Spanish Mexico and later independent Mexico by contrived war, violence, twisted brutal political actions. Manifest Destiny was really, infamy, brutality, vanity, criminality, supremacy.
Like Trump Australia has its own anti-immigration supporters, one Neuron and, as of Friday, the Anus Taylor-led Libs. Of course with Taylor it’s not all immigrants we don’t want, just the wrong sort. Perhaps not to the same extent as in the US but here immigrants still do much of the grunt work Aussies think they are too good for.
It’s gobsmacking that these politicians put their racism before their brains. How difficult is it to know that if you get rid of immigrants or refuse entry, then business will suffer and ultimately so will we. Our hospitals are staffed with brown skinned people, doing the job that we haven’t got the manpower to do. Our nursing homes, our carers, our cleaners, all very important to the well-being of all. How does Angus expect we’ll increase our housing without (a lot) more carpenters, as one example? Does he even care? How will we tolerate more years of this political rot?
It’s same US ‘architects’ Koch (IPA, CIS etc.) ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘segregation economics’ with the whiffy Tanton Network (SPA etc.).
Equals Project 2025 Vought and Miller respectively, bipartisan and eugenics driven Anglosphere migration policies; disgust, deterrence & violence vs acceptance & support.
Both networks inform Fox News with related fossil fuel and/or immigration talking points, with woke, LGBT, free speech etc. in between.
Reported and alleged by Media Matters & NYT that when alleged ‘Russian asset’ Tucker Carlson was a Fox News host, NewsCorp management inferred editorial from him…..till suddenly stood down (within another friend of Tanton’s and Abbott’s bosses….)
Related, a relatively contemporary issues of the southern border counched in socio-economic terms was ‘The Golden Door’ written by Paul ‘Population Bomb’ Ehrlich in 20thC.
Only until 2003 (SPLC) when he was a peer of and collaborator with the late white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton at fossil fuel ZPG Zero Population Growth etc.