By James Moore

We thought we were clever but I suspect we were mostly naive and maybe even a bit rude. Down on U.S. Highway 83, south of Laredo and along the border with Mexico, there was an old community rising up out of the waters of Falcon Lake. Guerrero Viejo had been submerged after the construction of the Falcon Lake reservoir subsequent to World War II. A serious drought was lowering the water level and some of the estimated 1000 buildings were becoming visible from the shoreline of a park on the north bank. From what history I had been able to learn at the library, there were an estimated 1000 structures that had been abandoned as the waters backed up behind the dam. There were supposedly carved stone sidewalks and buildings decorated with lintels, varying types of frames, cornices, and water fountains shaped like baptismal fonts. Wrought iron covered balconies and windows and protected tombs in the old graveyard. The mostly sandstone architecture was out of time even as it was built and represented an eighteenth-century style in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I was interested in the church, visible from the U.S. side of the Rio Grande. The water had lowered to reveal the top half of the Church of Our Lady of Refuge, and it looked like my cameraman and I could putter through the three naves on our john boat and enter the sanctuary while filming. Walls rose above semi-circular arches and crowned the central nave and it appeared we would slip easily beneath it and into the interior. We launched our aluminum skiff and crossed the lake, killed the motor, and coasted into a beautiful structure. The roof appeared flat and the supporting wooden beams were exposed. The entry through which we had passed was designed with sandstone columns that led to a long frieze and a molded cornice decorated with triglyphs. The belfry above us had three windows that let in enough light through the caving roof to illuminate the space for our 1970s-era video camera.

The Church of Our Lady of Refuge

The history of the ghost town was as fascinating as its architecture, but much too complex and nuanced for a 90-second report on the TV news in Laredo. Guerreo had been established in 1754 during the latter part of Mexico’s colonial rule by Spain when a viceroy sent 750 soldiers and 2500 colonists to settle and create six Villas del Norte, which also included Laredo. Guerrero became a fortress against the raiding Comanche and Apache peoples who had been pushed out of the southern plains of the U.S. by advancing European settlers and were attempting to take domain over Northern Mexico. In the ensuing decades, the little town asserted its opposition to continuing Spanish rule and was occupied by U.S. forces during the Mexican American war from 1846-1848 before joining the revolution in the early part of the twentieth century.

And then it was flooded to provide drink to a thirsty land.

Beneath the Waters of Lake Falcon

La Frontera was a wonderland to me in my youth. Being a guero from up near the Canadian border, I was enchanted by a different culture just a few miles from the ranch where we lived. The little red-haired girl and I crossed the river bridge almost every weekend to Nuevo Laredo for food and drink and music and shopping. When my wisdom teeth needed extraction and I could not afford the $400 of an American dentist on my $160 weekly salary, I went to Reynosa and had all four pulled for $100. The young practitioner lacked certain skills and damaged a nerve that affected the rear, right quarter of my tongue, and I was unable to speak clearly enough for my job as a radio announcer for almost a month. Talking was not essential, though, to enjoy the tropical air moving through the palm fronds on a January night in the plazas or the rum punches coming to our tables non-stop at the old Cadillac Bar or the mariachis serenading young lovers on park benches.

After moving up the Rio Grande to Laredo, we often drove the river road back down to the Lower Rio Grande Valley to visit friends. There was a cafe in Roma, below Falcon Lake, which served fresh, hot flour tortillas swathed in butter next to plates of refried beans and avocados and when we left there we drove past the spot where a dock used to be located for unloading steamships. Into the mid-nineteenth century, the paddle wheelers came 150 miles up the Rio Grande to deliver supplies that had been brought by ships to the port of Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico. There is a brown wall of metal bollards rising up near the river now and the neighboring nation, America’s largest trade partner, is no longer visible for a long stretch of road. The state of Texas has offered to donate a 1400 acre ranch adjacent to the wall for the radical new federal administration to turn into a processing center for the deportation of immigrants.

The image occurs of people being delivered to human corrals for processing and shipping out with no more consideration than cattle off a feed lot. Mexico will not accept returnees that are not their citizens, which creates more logistical and legal problems for the new Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol. Construction of deportation centers will need to be more efficient than the building of the wall by the incoming president and governor of Texas. By the end of 2024, Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star will have put up only 35 miles of wall at $25-$30 million a mile, about a half mile per week. The work leaves gaps of hundreds of miles open on the 805 mile-long border, and decades will be needed to complete the wall at current rates of construction. Texas conservatives have spent $11 billion dollars to protect the border with state troopers, National Guard soldiers, razor wire, and floating barriers, which has only served to force immigrants further to the west and the made the state spend tax money that might be better used giving teachers pay raises.

In offering acreage for a deportation headquarters, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham made the potential operation sound more like an incarceration facility for convicts while characterizing immigrants as outlaws who rape and pillage their way across the landscape. The exact opposite is fact, however. A 2020 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed data from Texas and found that undocumented immigrants were 46% less likely, and legal immigrants were 66% less likely, to be convicted of crimes compared to citizens born in the U.S. Research by the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington also acquired the same statistical findings.

“On day one,” Buckingham said during a visit to the border, “President Trump will marshal every lever of power to secure the border, protect their communities, and launch the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrant criminals in history.”

The illegal immigrant problem has, however, already been effectively addressed during the past year by President Biden’s administration and the leadership of Mexico. A national comprehensive policy by the Mexican government intercedes with migrants crossing its territory from various parts of the world and en route to the U.S. border. The implementation of the Customs and Border Protection app, CBP One, has also had a dramatic impact on reducing immigrant numbers. Half of the arrivals at American customs and immigration have legally scheduled appointments managed through the app. Any attempt to sneak across the border would eliminate chances at being legally processed toward citizenship and employment. According to CBP’s recently released figures, encounters with undocumented immigrants have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.

The president-elect remains oblivious to these figures, or, more likely, is ignoring them for political effect. He has threatened Mexico with a 25 percent tariff on all imports if it does not agree to shut down immigration and stop the flow of illegal drugs. Trump’s obliviousness extends beyond immigration to a lack of knowledge about the fact that consumer demand in this country is what feeds the cartels’ business and that those operations are militarized by guns and other weapons going south to Mexico from the U.S. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo smartly remonstrated Trump by calling for cooperation instead of threats to solve the fentanyl and migration problems.

“You must also be aware of the illegal trafficking of firearms into my country from the United States,” she said. “Seventy percent of the illegal weapons seized from criminals in Mexico come from your country. We do not produce these weapons, nor do we consume synthetic drugs. Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours.”

Trump can talk, but he cannot reasonably act on tariffs with the U.S.’ largest trading partner. The economic impacts would be catastrophic. The open borders that originated with the North American Free Trade Act have made possible hundreds of thousands of jobs in Mexico and affordable products in this country. Maquiladoras, which are just one element of the $800 billion dollar economic engine between the two nations, allow the import of resources and parts to factories just south of the border, which are assembled and then shipped, duty free, through customs to Texas for final assembly and purchase by manufacturers for use in retail products like refrigerators and vehicles and other large ticket items. In Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, an estimated 140,000 jobs are dependent on maquiladoras that manufacture elements for electronics and automobiles. Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis have for decades been assembling in Mexico completed cars and trucks for delivery and purchase in the states. A tariff would put sticker prices, already approaching absurd, well out of reach of average wage earners.

Just the threat of a tariff is already reducing the value of the peso against the dollar, which means Mexicans can afford less when purchasing in Texas and have reduced motivation to shop on this side of the border. Consumers here may not be able to afford fresh produce, either, if Trump institutes tariffs. One third of all produce consumed by Americans is imported, and half that total comes from Mexico, including 90 percent of all avocados. Those grocery prices Trump promised voters he would get under control would rise by more than the 25 percent tariff. Mexico has countered with a statistical threat of its own, suggesting its economists have predicted the U.S. would lose 400,000 jobs as a consequence of a tariff on its imports.

Trump ought to reconsider. He will not. And hell will follow with him.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.