Open Letter to Greg Abbott, Texas Military Department and Department of Public Safety
February 7, 2024
Dear Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Military Department and Texas Department of Public Safety:
This past weekend our city experienced a frightening spectacle when you held a major press event at our local Shelby Park with 14 governors from out of state, and excluded any actual Eagle Pass, or U.S.border residents.
Due to your heavy-handed and highly staged media event and dangerous rhetoric about our border community, armed militias from across the United States were inspired to invade our normally quiet, safe, and peaceful border town.
We have now learned that arrests occurred and several people related to “God’s Army” convoy were heavily armed and planning to commit acts of violence in our community.[1]
We are lifelong residents of Eagle Pass. This has never happened before. We have never felt unsafe in our border town until this past weekend.
We are grateful to the Eagle Pass Police Department and Maverick County Sheriff’s Office for protecting us and maintaining peace and civility with this chaotic situation that you invited into our Texas city.
We the citizens of Eagle Pass do hereby request that you vacate Shelby Park and return it back to us, the citizens of Eagle Pass who are the rightful owners of that property.
It is an affront to us as U.S. taxpayers and as citizens of this great state, that you have seized our public park – which is owned by everyone – to support an extreme partisan political agenda that endangers our families.
Our beautiful and safe public park has been taken away from us, and turned into a military style staging area, now being used as a backdrop for political theater by you, who live over 200 miles away, and out-of-state politicians. Even the TV celebrity Dr. Phil, who lives in Beverly Hills, CA was allowed to attend. Meanwhile, local residents can no longer use our park for fishing, kayaking, flea markets, sports, barbecues, quinceañeras, or to have our children play, as we did daily for generations.
Most importantly, when you and other out-of-town politicians speak to the national media to supposedly tell the nation what is happening on the border, you have excluded the voices of the very residents who live here. Why? Because we would tell the true story of who we actually are: a beautiful, quiet and safe city.
You are creating a fiction, and using our community’s resources to do it. You are telling a dangerous and misleading story about us, about the border, about our safe communities. Crime statistics show that border communities are safer on average than most other cities in Texas and America. In doing so, you are inviting in the very danger that you claim to be protecting us against.
Yes our communities are being invaded, but it is not migrants who pose the threat.
The Texas National Guard seizure of Shelby Park is illegal. It has not only blocked federal U.S. Border Patrol agents from entering and patrolling the area, and doing their job, but it has also effectively barred us, the residents and taxpayers of Eagle Pass, from accessing our own public park.
We refuse to be treated as second class citizens in our own town, in our state, in our own country.
We kindly request that you relinquish control over Shelby Park and restore our rights and access to our own public space. We believe that it is possible to ensure border security without infringing upon the rights of local residents to access our cherished public spaces.
We look forward to a resolution that respects the needs of our community while addressing the concerns of border security.
We also invite you to sit with us, for once, and listen to our actual needs here on the border.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
The Residents of Eagle Pass and members of the Eagle Pass Border Coalition
[1] DiCasimirro, Gemma, Planas, Antonio. “Tennessee man who was working with militias planned to act as a sniper and attack Southern border, feds say.” NBC News. February 6, 2024.
