Sheriff Roy Boyd of Goliad County, Texas, joined other law enforcement officials from his state recently to raise the alarm about the border crisis that’s wreaking havoc in America. These local officials, who confront the consequences daily, are now calling it an “invasion.”
Boyd, a seventh-generation Texan, recently spoke to The Daily Signal about what it’s like in Goliad County, the vicious cartels trafficking humans and drugs, and why the problem of illegal immigration is much worse than anyone realizes.
“This is just a tidal wave of people coming across. It is an invasion. There’s no two ways about it,” Boyd said. “When you, as a taxpayer in the state of Texas, can’t utilize your own property because of the massive wave of people, it is an invasion, and that’s exactly what it is.”
When you go down into deep South Texas, a lot of the ranches are now abandoned. The people who own those lands can no longer utilize them because of the cartel presence on their ranches. If they are there, they can’t leave their houses without leaving somebody behind armed. They’re getting carjacked at their gates on their own properties.
Where we’re at, we have a lot of absentee landowners, and that’s property where nobody actually lives on the land. And so, what’s happening is the cartel is coming in, and they will set up stash sites on those ranches where nobody is at, where they’ll either strip vehicles [or] stage stolen vehicles.
They’ll hide illegal aliens while they’re going to gas up or whatnot, or somebody will bring them up from Mexico to where we’re at. Then, somebody comes from Houston to pick them up and then take them the rest of the way.
And so, that’s what we’re looking at.
Your average Border Patrol agent, Homeland Security agent, wants to do something, but the Biden administration has worked extremely hard to tie their hands and prevent them from doing the jobs that they’ve been sworn to do. And it makes it extremely frustrating.
So, what we’re doing is we find alternatives in order to accomplish those goals.
Thank God [that] Gov. Abbott, through his leadership, was able to acquire money that came to local law enforcement agencies to give us the capacity to go after the cartel activities within our jurisdictions, because most of us only have one to two deputies working in our entire county at any given time. [We] just don’t have the manpower, the resources, to combat something like the cartel coming in.
So, thanks to the governor, we’re able to hire some individuals, some officers, that all their job is to go out and combat transnational criminal activity within our jurisdictions.
So, what we’ve done is, we took that funding that the governor’s office gave us and reached out to other law enforcement agencies. And right now, there are 16 of us who have come together to try to put pressure on the cartel to get them out of our region.
Now, they’re not paying the government for the use of those territories, but what the cartel has done is they’ve come into Texas, they’ve come into other states, and they’ve claimed territory.
And what they did then was they turned all of our main prison gangs, like Mexican Mafia, Texas Syndicate, Aryan Brotherhood, those people are now mere contractors to the cartel. The cartel runs these territories with an iron fist. And if you don’t conduct business the way that they authorize, well, then you disappear, and we never see you again.
So, the cartel has come in and done that. They’ve also bought up and established what you would think are legitimate businesses within our communities. And they use this not only to move slaves through, but also [to] move drugs through [and] to launder their money. So, they put their money into the system and deposit it in the bank, and at that point, they can use that money for whatever they want.
We have a lot of human trafficking that goes through. Everybody wants to think that this is an immigration problem, but in reality these people aren’t immigrants. They’re slaves. They’re brought out of their countries. The cartel moves them through Mexico, pays off the Mexican government as they go. They get here. They push them across.
Some of them, they turn over to Border Patrol or tell them to turn [themselves] over. The vast majority, they don’t do that to. They sneak them into the state, into the United States, and then they smuggle them through various means, getting them deeper into the U.S.
Those individuals are indentured servants here in the United States. Most of them, when we interview them, we find out that they believed when they got to the Mexico–Texas border, that they were paid up and could come across. However, once they get brought across, they’re now told they owe more money.
And I actually have a letter from a house where they were keeping sex slaves in another jurisdiction, where they articulate it takes eight to 13 years to buy your freedom once you’re brought into the United States. That’s if nobody turns around and sells you because you’re just property while you’re here.
And so, what we’ve done is, we’ve tried to educate people to be more vigilant and look for activity, look for places where activity might take place. And they’ve been doing that. But what we see is a lot more people who are concerned, and they’re now carrying firearms for their own protection.
The only way to solve this is to bring Mexico to their knees economically. The No. 1 expense of the cartels—and they have publicly complained about this for years in Mexico—is paying off all of the government officials in Mexico.
Mexico is a system that is set up with graft and corruption. The cartels have to pay them off at a hefty amount every single month. So, the officials in Mexico are making a lot of money off this.
The only way to make them stop this partnership with the cartel is to create enough economic pain from the loss of legitimate revenue that it finally outweighs their gain from their illegitimate revenue that they gain from their partnership with the cartels.
And so, why would you want to stop it if what you want is Marxism and what you want is a ruling class in peons? Why would you want to bring it to an end while you’re importing more and more people into the slave trade, which basically creates a peon class within our society?
We thought it was bad then, when we were finding the pamphlets that the Obama administration was having handed out in Mexico on how to get here and all the advertising on the radio in Mexico convincing people to come here illegally. We thought that was bad, but that’s nothing compared to this.
This is just a tidal wave of people coming across. It is an invasion. There are no two ways about it. When you, as a taxpayer in the state of Texas, can’t utilize your own property because of the massive wave of people, it is an invasion, and that’s exactly what it is.
Border Patrol tells me they estimate they apprehend 8 percent to 10 percent of the people that come across. You hear people talk about “got-aways.” There’s supposed to be 800,000 got-aways. Well, in order to be a got-away, Border Patrol either has to see them [or] see physical evidence like a footprint or something, that they escaped without being apprehended.
Well, there are a lot more coming across because there’s entire sections where nobody is patrolling. There are days in the Rio Grande Valley sector, which is a large sector, that there’s not one Border Patrol agent actually out working the border. Nobody’s looking for got-aways. So, you can imagine how many more there are when, on some days, there’s nobody looking for [them].
I talked to a Border Patrol agent a couple weeks ago, and he told me that they got told to quit reporting their got-aways, that he’s being told, “Hmm, don’t count those.” And the logic was, “Well, they may be counted somewhere else, so just don’t count them anymore.” And so, it just doesn’t make sense, unless you understand that this is all by design.
Historically what happens is, if you’re apprehended and you’re not going to be deported, you’re given what’s called a notice to appear. That notice to appear has that you have to appear on this date, at this time, at this court, at this address.
Well, now they’re handing them a notice to appear—[but] there’s no date, there’s no time, there’s no court, and there’s no address. But as long as they have that piece of paper, whether it’s filled out properly or not, no federal agent can touch them for immigration violation.
So, they’re letting these people in and telling the media and the public, “Oh, they have a notice to appear.” But in reality, it’s an incomplete notice to appear that just gives them carte blanche to break federal law.
The other thing you have to consider is what they’ve looked at this year is the people that they have deported. Depending on the sector you’re in, between 40 percent and 80 percent of those people then reenter and are encountered a second time or a third or a fourth.
We in Goliad have apprehended people in bailouts [for whom] this is their third, fourth time being caught. This really showed us the fact that it’s just a revolving door.
We just started filing state charges on everybody because the federal system is broken. They’re not going to do anything about it because this is what they want, so we’re just going to take care of it on the state side.
To be quite honest with you, when I first became a cop in 1994, Border Patrol had an incentive where they would bring us a box of bullets for every illegal alien we apprehended. And they would come pick them up, sometimes 20, 23, and shove them into a suburban.
Talk about a drastic change.
The whole thing is, in the end, we’re all going to be judged, not by the people, not by anything—we’re going to be judged by our Lord and maker. We’re going to have to answer for what we did. And while I may not be able to fix it, and I may not be able to bring it to an end, I’m going to do my part so that when I get to the pearly gates, at least when I get asked, they’ll know I did something.
