Texas Bar Owner Says Migrants Are Hiding in His Bathrooms After Entering US Through Hole in Border Wall

By Jack Cowhick March 15, 2021 at 2:42pm

This is certainly an unwelcome surprise.

Cabrera’s Bar, in the small Texas town of Granjeno along the Rio Grande River, is quickly becoming an impromptu shelter for illegal immigrants — and without the consent of the bar’s owner.

Lupe Cabrera, the owner of the bar, told National Review, “When I go in the mornings, sometimes I go to do some work, there’s people in the bathroom; they hide in the bathrooms.

“Me and my brother own a trucking company, too. They’ll hide in the trucks.”

The bar, opened by Cabrera’s father more than half a century ago, draws visitors from inside the community and outside. According to its owner, the bar is a popular recreational spot for the town of around 300 people as well as for new arrivals.

“They use it as a ‘Where are you? I’m at the bar here,'” he said.

According to Cabrera, “you’d always see people crossing over” in Granjeno. However, “it was always men. They were coming to work.” Now, the demographics have shifted. Thanks to President Joe Biden’s orders stopping work on the border wall system and ending the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum-seekers, Cabrera now witnesses entire Central American families crossing the border instead of Mexican workers.

The bar owners told National Review that during Donald Trump’s presidency, encounters with illegal immigrants dropped dramatically in the area. However, Biden’s border crisis has resulted in a massive rise in border crossings in an undefended area.

Cabrera said he would like the portion of the wall behind his bar to be completed. Of the migrants he’s encountered, he said, “Most of the people I see are harmless, but you never know what the hell’s going on, who’s crossing, or what.”

Do you think the border wall should be completed?

Cabrera is right to be suspicious. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 2020 fiscal year report, almost 120,000 immigrants who had criminal convictions or pending criminal charges were deported.

Despite these numbers, the current president decided to stop the construction of a wall to protect communities like Granjeno.

The bar owner’s contrast between the Trump administration and the Biden administration in immigration is accurate.

Customs and Border Protection reported that during the entire 2020 fiscal year, there were about 458,000 encounters with illegal immigrants.

Now, just five months into fiscal 2021, the U.S. is already approaching that number, with nearly 400,000 encounters already — including more than 100,000 in February alone.

In spite of this, two weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas denied the existence of the border crisis, instead calling it a simple “challenge.”

The surge of migrants comes as ICE released interim “operating guidelines” Feb. 18 that prevent its agents from apprehending anyone not deemed a threat to “national security” without approval from their chain of command.

This, along with construction on the wall being halted in January, has caused many law enforcement officials to be concerned for the safety of border communities.

Sheriff Mark Dannels of Cochise County, Arizona, noted in an interview with The Washington Times that, thanks to portions of the wall system being uncovered by actual barriers, illegal immigrants now have all-weather access roads serving as black market highways to border communities.

Communities and homes are also being overwhelmed, according to Arizona ranchers like John Ladd, who said the Border Patrol is simply “busing [immigrants]” into towns and “leaving them there.”

Some, like New Mexico rancher Russell Johnson, have been driven to patrol their communities armed to defend their families and property, as law enforcement and the Border Patrol are stretched too thin to be effective on the front lines of the crisis.

Biden has, in an effort to appeal to his radical Democratic base, abandoned border communities as a whole at the onset of a border crisis he created — and now they are feeling the impact.

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