BROWNSVILLE, Texas — The mayor of this Texas border city has been dealing with a crisis.
This past week, he declared a state of emergency. Drones filled the skies and emergency vehicles raced down the streets. But none of it had anything to do with illegal immigration.
It had to do with the weather.
A severe thunderstorm caused widespread flooding throughout the Rio Grande Valley in recent days. That other crisis — the one that President Trump says has been unfolding on the border because of the illegal entry of immigrants — is largely a fiction, says the mayor, Tony Martinez, and other Brownsville residents and leaders.
“There is not a crisis in the city of Brownsville with regards to safety and security,” said Martinez, who has lived here since the late 1970s.
“There’s no gunfire. Most of the people that are migrating are from Central America,’’ he said. “It’s not like they’re coming over here to try to take anybody’s job. They’re trying to just save their own lives. We’re doing fine, quite frankly.”
Martinez is a Democrat in a mainly conservative state, and many Republicans in Texas, like Trump, have raised an alarm over the numbers of migrants still flowing into Texas.
But there is evidence, in federal data and on the ground in places like Brownsville, that the immigration crisis Trump has cited over the past week to justify the separation of families is actually no crisis at all.
There has been no drastic overall increase in the number of immigrants crossing the border, and while the rugged frontier along the Rio Grande Valley has long been a transit point for drugs and the trouble that goes along with them, the violence of Mexico’s drug wars seldom spills into the United States.
In remarks and news releases this past week, Trump has repeatedly sounded alarm bells on the “crisis” and “mess” of illegal immigration at the southwestern border.
At an event Friday with families whose loved ones have been killed by unauthorized immigrants, Trump suggested that immigrants commit more crimes than citizens do. And at a campaign rally Wednesday, he said that “illegal immigration costs our country hundreds of billions of dollars.”
“We have to do something about immigration in this country,” Trump said at a Cabinet meeting Thursday. “For 50 years, and long before that, it was a disaster. But over the last 20, 25 years, it’s gotten worse.”
The numbers suggest that this is not true.
Unauthorized crossings along the border with Mexico have sharply declined over the past two decades, according to government data. From the 1980s to the mid-2000s, the government reported annually apprehending around 1 million to 1.6 million people who illegally attempted to cross the southwestern border.
That number has been halved in recent years. By month, border apprehensions averaged more than 81,588 under President George W. Bush, declined to more than 34,647 under President Barack Obama, and now stand at 24,241 under Trump.
The president is correct in citing a spike in illegal border crossings that occurred in March: The 37,393 individuals apprehended were a 203 percent increase over the same period in 2017.
Research shows that incarceration rates of both legal and illegal immigrants across the country are lower than those of native-born Americans, and that the net economic impact of immigration is positive.
Trump’s reference to illegal immigration costing “hundreds of billions of dollars” likely came from a heavily flawed study from an anti-immigration group that pinned the cost at $116 billion annually. Adjusting for the flaws, the impact would more accurately be stated as $3.3 billion to $15.6 billion, according to the libertarian Cato Institute.
“There’s this misconception that we’re in this lawless land, and it’s the wild, wild frontier, and it’s not,” said Brownsville’s police chief, Orlando C. Rodriguez. “We see actually a downward trend in crime in Brownsville over the past few years.”
Trump has often cited crimes committed by the transnational gang MS-13 in cities as far from the southern border as New York. Gang members have indeed been responsible for a wave of violence, though some of them were born in the United States, and much of their mayhem is targeted at immigrant communities.
The Republican leadership in Texas sees the situation differently, and has often highlighted evidence of killings, assaults, shootings and kidnappings on Texas soil that they say are directly related to Mexican drug cartels.
Sergio Sanchez, a Republican activist and commentator in nearby McAllen, agrees with Trump’s portrayal of the border and his hard-line approach to illegal immigration.
“The crisis is real,” said Sanchez, former chairman of the Hidalgo County Republican Party and the host of a conservative talk-radio show called The Wall.
Yet even state Republicans have balked at the turmoil created by the zero tolerance policy that has led to the separation of thousands of migrant children from their families. Several GOP lawmakers, including both Texas US senators, opposed breaking up families.