Videos Show Texas Troopers Ripping Apart Immigrant Families Through Deportation Pipeline
The Intercept
Dashcam videos obtained via open records requests show the Texas Highway Patrol is now actively participating in Donald Trump's deportation pipeline machine.
IN TEXAS, STATE troopers have become frontline enforcers of federal immigration laws. In recent years, and especially since Donald Trump was elected president, the Texas Highway Patrol, part of the state’s Department of Public Safety, or DPS, has developed a well-oiled deportation machine that scoops up drivers who’ve committed minor traffic infractions, then funnels them to the Border Patrol and sometimes Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Passengers and pedestrians who weren’t even driving are also taken into custody. Caught in the Texas deportation pipeline, immigrants’ lives are damaged or ruined, along with those of their children, many of whom were born and raised in the U.S.
It’s difficult to know exactly how often this is happening. DPS records are costly, hard to obtain, and difficult to interpret. Data on handovers was not collected until December 2015, and since then the reporting of these incidents has been haphazard. In 2017, troopers still were not consistently reporting all stops that resulted in handovers to the Border Patrol. Through public records requests, the ACLU of Texas determined that the agency’s internal documentation did not record the handovers of several individuals who the organization’s field organizers knew had been detained by the highway patrol, imprisoned, and, in some cases, removed from the country.
Subsequently, The Intercept, working with the ACLU of Texas, obtained several DPS dashcam videos that show immigrants being detained on the road for trivial violations and then carted away by the Border Patrol.
