After years of border crisis during the administration of former President Joe Biden in the United States, millions of illegal immigrants flooded into the southwestern border, causing chaos and leaving unforgettable scars in the small border town of Brackettville, Texas.
The continuous high-speed pursuits, buzzing helicopters circling in the sky, sharp and ear-piercing emergency alarms, hurried school lockdowns, torn prickly wire fences, and decaying bodies constantly appearing in ranches and along the Rio Grande River have all dealt a heavy blow to the numerous small towns near the Mexico border in Texas.
The border crisis that had occurred here had depleted Brackettville’s resources and altered the way of life in this small town with only two traffic lights located in Kinney County. Luckily, residents in the county and surrounding areas mentioned that the chaotic situation caused by illegal immigrants had almost overnight shifted to the inland areas of the United States, including Minnesota.
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, the chaos caused by illegal immigration has been significantly reduced. Upon his inauguration, the number of illegal border crossings dropped to a historic low. In the fiscal year 2025, a report by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stated that there were 443,000 illegal border crossing incidents along the southwest border with Mexico.
Compared to nearly 2.5 million incidents in 2024.
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe estimated that between 30,000 to 40,000 people were surging into the county each year in 2022 and 2023.
Coe was able to estimate the number of illegal immigrants due to hunting cameras installed on ranchers’ properties to capture images of deer and other wildlife, which eventually caught images of illegal immigrants.
“If we hadn’t risen to stop it in the manner we did — I think if that wave of illegal immigrants had continued, the whole county would have been completely destroyed,” he told The Epoch Times.
Brackettville is located north of the Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. Route 57 past Eagle Pass and west of the Uvalde checkpoint, making it an ideal hideout for fugitives or illegal immigrants trying to evade capture.
“The location of the checkpoint is somewhat related to geographical factors,” explained Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith to The Epoch Times.
During the border crisis, the region became a hotspot for smugglers’ high-speed pursuits, drawing attention from Texas and nationwide.
The Epoch Times had previously published an in-depth special report, delving into the severity of border smuggling corridors in an article entitled “Gotaways: The Hidden Border Crisis” on July 28, 2023.
However, after President Trump took office, ranchers no longer spent all their time repairing fences, picking up trash bins filled with discarded water bottles and clothes, or worrying about who might come out of the bushes.
They no longer needed to shield their windows at night for fear of attracting unwelcome guests with lights. Smith said, now hunters are once again taking their families to the deer leases they operate.
“So, it’s kind of like returning to the feeling of the Mayberry town,” Coe told The Epoch Times. Mayberry town was depicted in the 1960s TV show “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Matt Benacci, a member of the Brackett Independent School District school board, stated that K-12 basic education schools in the district had returned to normal teaching.
He disclosed to The Epoch Times that school lockdown measures had mostly ceased.
Benacci recalled that during the border crisis, smugglers would jump off vehicles and run through town to evade capture, leading to sometimes two lockdowns per day at the schools.
He recalled an incident where a car crashed into the school area and occupants abandoned the vehicle, with one illegal immigrant even attempting to open the gymnasium door to enter the school.
Later, the Brackett Independent School District placed large stones around each school as barriers to prevent similar incidents in the future.
Such pursuits would result in fatal consequences for residents as it had drained the town’s resources.
Smith recalled two incidents during the mass migration period when medical resources were directed to smuggling-related accidents, putting Kinney County residents in life-threatening medical emergencies.
“For example, if there were a significant accident or chase that was happening 20 miles or 25 miles north of the town, all of our resources went there,” he said.
If an ambulance had arrived at the scene on that unfortunate day in 2024, Benacci’s mother might still be alive.
“I try not to think about it much, because the only thing you’re going to do is really get mad,” Benacci’s voice choked with tears as he recalled the incident, his eyes welling up.
He said his 70-year-old mother Gloria Benacci passed away two years ago due to a stroke.
Local paramedics were unable to come to the rescue at that time because they were handling a fatal vehicle accident involving illegal immigrants. He also remembered the incident occupying the rescue helicopter.
In early March 2024, Texas state troopers pursued a vehicle carrying a U.S. citizen and several illegal immigrants. The vehicle overturned, ejecting the occupants, resulting in four deaths.
Due to the local emergency services being occupied with the accident, an ambulance from Uvalde, about 40 miles away, was dispatched to Benacci’s mother. The out-of-town ambulance arrived about an hour after receiving the emergency request.
Several hours later, rescue personnel eventually transported her to a hospital in San Antonio. He mentioned that his mother never regained the ability to breathe autonomously and passed away on March 13, 2024.
“Once the ambulance is committed to handling accidents like these, it can’t be diverted to do something else,” he referred to illegal immigrant accidents.
Even larger border cities were not spared.
Manuel Mello, the fire chief of Eagle Pass, mentioned that in 2022, their department received up to six calls per day about drowning incidents along the Rio Grande River. By 2025, the total number of drowning incident calls for the entire year had dropped to about six.
He said the emergency call volumes on the Rio Grande, as well as those involving foreign nationals, had dropped by 95%.
“The situation improved significantly after the new administration took office,” he said. “Previously, we almost received calls for help from the river every day, and now I don’t think we have received a single call in the past two to three months.”
At one point, the situation was so bad that Chief Mello even set up a team specifically to handle calls for help along the riverbank. He mentioned that the team dealt with multiple calls and sometimes were overwhelmed.
He mentioned that those attempting to enter the U.S. by hopping on trains often faced horrific injuries or fatalities. As the train doors automatically closed while in motion, many people’s hands or legs were crushed or severed by the sliding doors.
“We’ve seen a lot of people lose hands and feet, a lot of decapitations, a lot of them being killed,” he said.
Mello said the mass migration had put tremendous pressure on the entire medical system. According to him, both emergency services and hospital systems were overwhelmed.
“We had situations where we had to wait outside for up to 45 minutes to an hour for a bed. So now, I think my teams can breathe a bit easier,” he stated.
88-year-old local resident Wanda Selby mentioned that she no longer needed to carry her revolver when walking her dog.
“They (referring to illegal immigrants) aren’t as brazen as before,” she told The Epoch Times while strolling through the tall oak trees at Red Bridge Park.
Selby revealed to The Epoch Times that in 2022, after chatting with a young Texas state trooper, she decided to give up her routine walks alone.
The trooper parked near her friend’s ranch on a country road where she liked to walk, and he warned her that her revolver wouldn’t help her since the smugglers working for Mexican drug cartels all carried AK-47 rifles.
She remembered what he said, “Don’t let anyone know you have a gun because those people have bigger guns.”
Afterward, she chose to walk near her own house.
She recalled that in 2022 and 2023, she often heard helicopters circling near her home. Sometimes, fleeing illegal immigrants would end up on people’s porches.
Border patrol agents and state troopers frequently conducted searches in her community.
“It was a nightmare here,” she said. “Biden, not only did he let these people in, he welcomed murderers, drug dealers, anyone wanting to come in. These people were not reviewed at the border at all.”
Ben Binnion, a 39-year-old wildlife biologist, who managed a few thousand acres ranch just outside Eagle Pass, across the border from Mexico, shared that since 2021, the ranch had become a superhighway for human traffickers, leading to losses of at least $350,000.
Many illegal immigrants would bypass the checkpoint east of Eagle Pass, and some would travel north using Farm Road 481 near the ranch.
“It’s like a perfect storm,” he explained to The Epoch Times. “These illegal immigrants can be in San Antonio in a two-hour drive, and then they are home-free.”
According to Binnion, people had no idea how bad the situation was at the time.
He witnessed high-speed pursuits every day. Sometimes, smugglers would drive through fences directly.
For the safety of his wife and infant son, he had them leave the ranch as he knew his wife would protect the child if necessary.
“My wife was likely to kill for this,” he stated. “I mean, those people came to our house probably two times a week.”
He mentioned that during an 18-month period from 2021 to 2022, at least 200 people would enter the ranch each night. They would break into houses, barns, and other structures on the ranch every week.
“It was like a city, a big city, from here, and it was just over there…” he said, pointing at the miles of mesquite bushes and huisache trees. “It was pretty wild there for a while.”
Binnion picked up his phone and listed 21 different nationalities of people who discarded their identification documents on his ranch. The list included illegal immigrants from countries such as Afghanistan, China, the Congo, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Nigeria, and more.
He mentioned that groups of ten or eight young individuals would regularly ask him for food and to charge their phones.
These encounters made hunting on the ranch dangerous, as it was possible to see illegal immigrants suddenly appearing in the sight of the hunter when pulling the trigger to hunt.
Today, the situation of illegal immigrants entering the ranch is rarely seen.
Binnion said that after President Trump won the election, it was as if someone had flipped a light switch, and the frenzy abruptly stopped.
He remembered the last incident happening in December 2025. Border patrol captured a Honduran man linked to a drug trafficking organization who broke into a hunting cabin on a nearby ranch and stole a firearm.
Quail scattered on the asphalt bike lane leading to the Tequesquite Ranch, an 8,200-acre exotic-style hunting property spanning Kinney County and Maverick County.
Wayne King, 74, who managed the ranch for eight years, mentioned that the ranch suffered a loss of $300,000 due to the border crisis, with smugglers and illegal immigrants cutting holes in the fences, leading to the escape of some rare wildlife.
Observing the rugged landscape dyed silvery with grey-purple silver beardgrass, he nodded towards the ladder leaning against the fence.
He strategically placed the ladder there, hoping that illegal immigrants would use it to climb over the fence rather than cutting holes. However, the ladder was completely ineffective.
During Biden’s administration, King had repaired 450 cut holes in the 22-mile-long fence surrounding the ranch.
Illegal immigrants would gather in Jiménez, Mexico, then cross the border and traverse through his ranch.
A border patrol agent informed him that on the Mexican side, vendors running Mexican taquerias were providing wire cutters for free to customers buying food.
“There was definitely a lot of crime going on here,” he told The Epoch Times.
King testified in the Texas State Senate about an encounter he had with a group of illegal immigrants in 2021.
One night around 1:30 a.m., he heard a knock on the door. Looking out of the window, he saw 12 men dressed in black camouflage sitting on his driveway.
“I sat there with my rifle,” he said. “These were not good guys.”
King mentioned that he installed motion-sensing lights around his ranch house that seemed to deter nighttime encounters with illegal immigrants.
Another time, a smuggler crashed a truck through the ranch’s fence, attempting to evade border patrol pursuit. The truck went about a mile into the ranch, crashing into a roadside ditch. The tires caught on fire, and the pickup truck burst into flames.
The driver and three passengers on the truck managed to escape but were later captured in another stolen truck.
According to Smith, these efforts to consume local resources and prevent such occurrences did not really reduce but rather shifted to cities like Minneapolis.
Smith agreed that all illegal immigrants should be deported, not just those with a criminal record, in order to deter such incidents.
“All of this is deeply connected to our Kinney County because if they don’t enforce mass deportations, it will only stimulate more people to rush in. I mean, that’s how this works,” Smith said.
King viewed this as a kind of border invasion. The problems Minneapolis was facing due to illegal immigrants were the inevitable result of border invasions.
President Trump’s decision to deport the millions who illegally entered during Biden’s administration garnered his support.
“We’re just recovering from this invasion. After going through all the torment, yes, we want them all gone, every single one of them,” he said.
Selby expressed her confusion about the attacks on immigrants and ICE enforcement agents in Minneapolis.
“I am patriotic, and I believe (ICE) is just doing their best to enforce the law,” Selby said.
She vocally questioned why there were no protests or riots when American citizens were raped or murdered by illegal immigrants.
Binnion feared that such attacks might resurge in 2028, depending on who would win the next U.S. presidential election.