A man standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande was injured on Saturday night when a Texas National Guard soldier opened fire across the water, Mexico’s top diplomat said.
The unidentified man was on the riverbanks of Ciudad Juárez when the troop in El Paso fired, according to Roberto Velasco, the chief of the North America bureau at the Mexican Foreign Ministry.
Velasco said the Mexican government has asked the Texas Department of Public Safety to investigate the incident while officials in Mexico make inquiries into why the injured man was on the banks of the Rio Grande.
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The victim sustained an injury to his right leg and was hospitalized, according to the state government of Chihuahua. The Texas Military Department, which oversees the Texas National Guard, confirmed in a statement that a service member assigned to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star “discharged a weapon in a border-related incident” on Saturday night and said an investigation is underway.
The troubling incident occurred just hours before a Texas Tribune and Military Times report revealed that Operation Lone Star had disbanded its intelligence wing after a whistleblower revealed that it was illegally spying on migrants before they ever crossed the U.S. southern border and suspected criminal organizations inside Mexico.
The alleged illegal surveillance, which included the infiltration of invite-only WhatsApp groups used by migrants to communicate, is said to have violated long-standing rules against state-run spy operations, the Tribune reported.
Commanders in Operation Lone Star reportedly demanded military-style intelligence from its intelligence personnel, which some border officers scoffed at.
“Everyone [in charge] wanted to pretend it was like Iraq in 2003,” one intelligence officer told the Tribune. “They wanted to do Army stuff, even though this is [legally] not Army stuff.”
Spying allegations are far from the only trouble roiling the Texas National Guard. The agency is also accused of loosely passing around classified FBI intelligence to guardsman colleagues—a reported violation of federal secrecy laws, according to an internal incident report obtained by the Tribune.
No guardsman faces criminal charges in the ordeal, but four top intelligence officers are facing administrative penalties. The Tribune identified the quartet as Lt. Col. David “Eric” Tyler, Maj. Dezi J. Rios, Chief Warrant Officer Eric E. Hack, and Lt. Emmanuel L. Pierre. It’s unclear what their exact punishment is.
Operation Lone Star was launched by Abbott in 2021 to slow illegal immigration and smuggling at the southern border, calling it a necessity to “address this unparalleled catastrophe caused by President (Joe) Biden.”
There’s been no evidence of a significant slow down in migrant crossings since the operation’s launch, but those running the $4.5 billion dollar program have repeatedly found themselves embroiled in controversy.
That includes claims from guardsman that they were ordered to push crossing migrants back into the Rio Grande and to deny water to those who made it across. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called the orders barbaric.
“We called the shift officer in command, and we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico,” a whistleblower told the Tribune. “We decided that this was not the correct thing to do, with the very real potential of exhausted people drowning.”
The operation is also being probed by the Department of Justice for possibly violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and one of its frontline troopers was busted for selling pieces of protective gear he was issued for the initiative.
Read it at The Dallas Morning News
