Latino Voters, White Grievance Politics, and the Limits of the Anti-Immigrant Strategy by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Latino Voters, White Grievance Politics, and the Limits of the Anti-Immigrant Strategy

by

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

March 9, 2026

Recent reporting on the Texas primaries suggests that Republicans are beginning to worry about something that once seemed improbable: that the Latino voters who helped power Donald Trump’s 2024 victory may be drifting away from the coalition they helped build.

In heavily Latino parts of Texas, Democratic primary turnout last week significantly outpaced Republican turnout. Local officials in the Rio Grande Valley—long considered a key testing ground for Republican gains among Latino voters—are now warning that enthusiasm for the GOP appears to be fading.

But in many ways, this should not come as a surprise.

The political coalition that helped Republicans expand their Latino vote in 2024 was always built on a fragile foundation. Latino voters, like other Americans, hold diverse views on issues such as the economy, education, religion, and public safety. Some were drawn to Republican messaging around economic opportunity or border management. Yet the broader ideological framework shaping the modern Republican Party remains deeply rooted in white grievance politics—a politics that often frames immigrants and communities of color as threats to national identity, culture, and security.

There is a limit to how long that contradiction can hold.

For years, anti-immigrant rhetoric has been a central organizing force within the party. But rhetoric has increasingly been translated into policy. The administration’s aggressive deportation campaign—promoted as the largest in U.S. history—has swept up not only recent arrivals but also long-time undocumented residents and families with deep roots in their communities. Federal raids, workplace enforcement, and high-profile immigration crackdowns have made the consequences of this politics visible in everyday life.

Even voters who supported tougher border enforcement did not necessarily anticipate policies that would reach so deeply into communities, workplaces, and families.

When a political movement is fueled by grievance—particularly grievance centered on race, demographic change, and national belonging—it inevitably produces policies that punish the very communities it seeks to court politically. Latino voters may swing between parties, as many analysts note, but they are also paying close attention to how policies affect their neighbors, their workplaces, and their families.

What the Texas primaries may be revealing is not a sudden shift, but the limits of a political strategy built on exclusion.

Coalitions built through fear and resentment are inherently unstable. And when policies begin to translate rhetoric into lived consequences, voters notice.

Texas primaries raise GOP alarm about Latino voters

Strong Democratic turnout last week in heavily Latino parts of Texas has some Republicans fearing they will struggle to maintain the coalition Trump built in 2024.

March 8, 2026 | Washington Post





By Hannah Knowles and Clara Ence Morse

The Republican mayor of McAllen, Texas, says he wasn’t surprised last week when Democrats saw robust primary turnout in his heavily Latino border region of the state.

“The excitement there was with the Hispanic community and the Republican Party is kind of waning,” Mayor Javier Villalobos lamented.

Some of Villalobos’s family members who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024 — fueling Republicans’ gains with Latino voters around the country — are telling him they think they made a mistake, the mayor said. Many people who initially cheered Trump for securing the border now think his immigration crackdown has gone too far.


Villalobos worries that Republicans’ hopes of picking up five House seats with a redrawn Texas map are fading — particularly because four of those districts are majority-Latino.

“There’s a good chance that we may lose one or two of those … maybe even more, based on the way that things are going right now,” he said.

Turnout last week in Texas was the latest fuel for GOP worries that the Latino voters who helped power Trump’s 2024 victory are slipping away ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Heavily Hispanic areas have swung back toward Democrats in key off-year races as polls show the public souring on Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration, among other issues.

People protest President Donald Trump's inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, in McAllen, Texas.
(Eric Gay/AP)

Trump was elected on promises to carry out the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. But the scope of his administration’s crackdown has still surprised some supporters who expected him to focus more narrowly on violent criminals. His deportation push has ensnared undocumented immigrants living in the United States for years, including children, and his deployment of federal agents in Democratic-led cities drew intense backlash — especially after the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida), who has championed immigration reform legislation, said in an interview that Texas is part of a string of warning signs. She pointed to November’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where the most heavily Latino counties swung most sharply toward Democrats.

Republicans, she said, are “understanding that because of those excesses of what happened the first year with immigration … the Republican Party has lost this great coalition that we put together in ’24.”

“Republicans must course-correct now before it’s too late,” she urged last week on social media.

Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida) says Texas is part of a string of warning signs for Republicans. (Marta Lavandier/AP)


Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R-Florida), who has championed immigration reform legislation, said in an interview that Texas is part of a string of warning signs. She pointed to November’s elections in Virginia and New Jersey, where the most heavily Latino counties swung most sharply toward Democrats.

Republicans, she said, are “understanding that because of those excesses of what happened the first year with immigration … the Republican Party has lost this great coalition that we put together in ’24.”

“Republicans must course-correct now before it’s too late,” she urged last week on social media.

“Democrats can burn piles of cash into a primary and temporarily juice their turnout, but that doesn’t change the reality on the ground that Latino voters are moving toward the Republican Party,” said Christian Martinez, a spokesman for House Republicans’ campaign arm.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said Trump got historic support from Latino voters and “is working diligently to deliver on his agenda to enforce federal immigration law, fix Biden’s affordability crisis, bring investment back to the United States, and more.”

There are caveats to Democrats’ high turnout in Texas’s primaries last week. In heavily Hispanic Starr County, for instance, many voters in the Democratic primary did not pick a Senate candidate, suggesting a disconnect with the broader party.

Still, Democrats’ turnout edge was striking in a red state where both parties held expensive and competitive primaries on Tuesday. Among the 21 Texas counties that are at least 75 percent Hispanic, 20 cast more votes in the Democratic primary for Senate than in the Republican race.

Democratic turnout was also higher in key House races in heavily Latino districts that Trump won handily in 2024. Among 10 Texas districts where the voting-age population is majority-Hispanic, several broke for Trump in 2024 by 10 or more points and last week saw more Democrats than Republicans vote in their House primaries.

Trump set off an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymandering push in Texas last summer in an effort to maintain GOP control of the House. Trump has openly expressed concern that Democrats — who responded with a redrawn map in California and have an effort underway in Virginia — could investigate him and his administration if they win back control of the chamber.

Texas Republicans passed a redrawn map they hope will net five additional GOP seats. But Democrats could hold some of the seats if Republicans fall significantly short of Trump’s 2024 performance.

In the redrawn 34th District, where Trump won by 10 points, about 56,000 people cast primary votes for Democratic House candidates on Tuesday, while about 34,000 cast primary votes for Republican candidates.

“November’s still a long way away. … We have to be careful and thoughtful,” said Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, who is seeking reelection to the district. “But it looks to be a potential blue wave if the election was today.”

Gonzalez said voters are upset about the cost of living, the cost of health care and the aggressiveness of Trump’s immigration crackdown. Local builders who have been supportive of Trump have been sounding the alarm about their loss of labor. The executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, a Trump voter, traveled to Washington last month to warn lawmakers that “South Texas will never be red again.”

Dave Carney, a GOP strategist and adviser to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), said Republicans still “feel great” about South Texas. They plan to make major investments in races there and have recruited candidates to run for local offices that previously went uncontested, he said.

Like many Republicans, he also suggested the backlash to Trump’s immigration policies would ease after recent administration changes. Trump in January sidelined a controversial border official amid an uproar over federal agents’ killings of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis and last week replaced Kristi L. Noem as head of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s unclear whether the new leadership will result in significant changes to Trump’s immigration policy.

“I think we’re going to see many of the headlines, and the crisis being fanned by the left, dissipate to a great extent,” Carney said.

But Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist focused on Latino voters, said he’s been struck by the consistency of the trend lines among different Latino communities around the country — from Dominican Americans in New Jersey to Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande Valley.

His takeaway: Latino voters are “de-aligned and detached from both parties,” meaning they can swing back and forth between Democrats and Republicans. Right now, Madrid said, Republicans have “completely overplayed their hand.”

Scott Clement and Teo Armus contributed to this report.

Border drownings rose as migrants rushed to cross and Texas clamped down, Washington Post, Dec. 8, 2024

Earlier this year in February, I alerted blog readers to this bone-chilling NBCNews.com report from workers whose job it is to recover bodies out of the water in the Eagle Pass/Piedras Negras border. First responders in a Texas town are struggling to cope with the trauma of recovering bodies from the Rio Grande [trigger warning]. Such macabre jobs should not even exist to begin with!

Migrants often opt for Eagle Pass, a city of 28,000, as a crossing point due to its proximity to a relatively safer region of Mexico, and a modicum of distance from criminal elements, despite the Rio Grande's characteristic challenging conditions. This includes strong currents, variable water levels, extreme temperatures, and, of course, the presence of "la migra," or the border patrol, in an area that is more militarized than ever. 

There's a good reason why Mexicans give the Rio Grande River its name, "El Rio Bravo," meaning "wild river." El río es traicionero, meaning that the river is treacherous. To this, add Governor Abbott's cruel razor wire on the buoys (boyas) that make it a savage and inhumane border that has taken a shocking number of lives.

Between 2017 and 2023, at least 1,107 individuals drowned while attempting to cross the river, with the highest number of fatalities occurring in 2022, coinciding with a significant increase in attempts to enter the United States. Notably, there was a rise in the number of women among the deceased, and in 2023, over 10 percent of the drownings involved children. The story of 4-year old Angelica is gripping. It's so sad and tragic to learn—from this very well-researched Washington Post piece—that 75 children or more drowned in the river over this 7-year timeframe.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the Biden administration have disagreed on how to manage this influx, with the state implementing cruel and lethal measures such as buoys (boyas) with razor wire and shipping containers that serve as barriers to river crossing. Knowing that so many people are literally losing their lives should force policymakers—especially the governor—to pause and reflect on how at some point, the collateral effects of policy with people losing their lives become indistinguishable from deliberately engineering it.

My heart aches when I read of migrants preferring this risk over that of losing their lives figuratively and literally in their countries of origin. Longer term, our countries in our hemisphere need to embark on a new path forward, one that involves large-scale investment to stimulate economic development, involving massive infrastructure projects while addressing systemic challenges, encouraging the development of binational institutions, and various other measures like investments in education and a spirit of binationalism and multinationalism that would promote stability across the region.

Regrettably, our country has chosen to take an extremely hardline approach, turning away from opportunities that could benefit everyone and address the root causes of migration—ensuring people wouldn’t have to risk life and limb to seek a better future for themselves and their families. With Donald Trump coming into power, it's only going to get worse.

-Angela Valenzuela

Border drownings rose as migrants rushed to cross and Texas clamped down

An investigation by The Washington Post and other news organizations found more deaths than Mexico or the U.S. have reported. Many were in Eagle Pass, where the Texas governor’s border crackdown is concentrated.


Migrants wade into the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas, on Sept. 28. (Video: Jabin Botsford)

December 8, 2024

By Arelis R. Hernández, Melissa del Bosque, Charles Boutaud, Monica Camacho, Sarah Cahlan, Jack Sapoch and Miriam Ramirez


EAGLE PASS, Texas — Angelica had journeyed with her parents, older brother, aunt and uncle by foot from South America through a muddy jungle, ridden atop sooty train cars and slept in noisy city plazas hoping to reach the United States.

Now it was dawn and the 4-year-old girl’s family could see their destination from across the Rio Grande. The adults sent messages to relatives back in Venezuela before stepping into the river with the two children.

“Ya no aguantamos más,” wrote Robiet Farías, Angelica’s uncle, saying he could not bear waiting anymore to enter the United States.

Santiago, left, and his uncle, Robiet Farías, ride atop a Mexican train headed for the U.S. border in November 2023. (Family photo)

The family held one another’s hands and formed a chain with other migrants crossing the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass that November day in 2023. But as they got deeper into the river, something went wrong. Panic set in. The Farías family disappeared into the water.

This stretch of the Rio Grande has become a graveyard as the number of people dying while trying to cross rises. An investigation by The Washington Post; Lighthouse Reports, an investigative news organization, and the El Universal newspaper in Mexico found that hundreds more people have drowned than the U.S. and Mexican governments have reported.

And nowhere in Texas have more people died than in Eagle Pass, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s $11 billion border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, is concentrated.

Wristbands scattered in the mud on the banks of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass on Sept. 27. The bands are typically used by smugglers to verify that migrants have paid for their crossing. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)



Clothes belonging to migrants are tangled in concertina razor wire near the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass on Sept. 27. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The news organizations collected death records from every Texas county and Mexican state that borders the Rio Grande since 2017, when President-elect Donald Trump first took office pledging to crack down on illegal migration, to examine the effects of enforcement and migration policies on asylum seekers, and whether these factors have increased drownings.

The data shows that at least 1,107 people drowned trying to cross the river in the seven years from 2017 to 2023. The deaths peaked in 2022 as the number of people trying to enter the United States soared. A rising number of women were among the dead. In 2023, more than 1 in 10 drownings involved a child.

The spike in deaths coincided with a record surge in people attempting to cross into the United States illegally. Many of those migrants chose to cross the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, a city of 28,000 that has emerged as a flash point in the nation’s debate over migration. Abbott and the Biden administration have clashed over how to respond to the surge, with the Texas governor installing dozens of miles of razor wire, shipping containers and buoys, and the White House accusing the state of blocking its access to the river.

Migrants often choose Eagle Pass because it is across the river from a part of Mexico that is considered safer than other regions controlled by criminal gangs. But the river there has a significant current in certain areas, and gets deeper as people reach the midpoint. Weeds and rocks can make it difficult to get one’s footing.




The records obtained by the news organizations show drownings in Eagle Pass have risen significantly in recent years. The Post and its partners mapped the fatalities there using location data provided on death records. The analysis shows that as the number of deaths rose, bodies increasingly began washing up in new locations

From 2017 to 2020, more than half the victims in Eagle Pass were found near the downtown area. After 2021, the year that Operation Lone Star began, drowning victims were largely discovered away from the city’s center.

While it is unclear whether Texas’s border security initiative caused that shift, interviews with dozens of asylum seekers, state and federal law enforcement officials, migration experts and elected officials indicate that the barriers pushed migrants to cross in new and, sometimes, more dangerous areas.

“The intention is to make it more difficult for people,” said Margarita Núñez Chaim, the coordinator for Iberoamericana University’s migration issues program in Mexico. “And that, as a result, makes it more deadly.”

Abbott’s office disputed the idea that Operation Lone Star might have contributed to any deaths, saying that the initiative is deterring migrants from crossing the Rio Grande. In a statement, officials said the Biden administration is to blame for increased drownings by encouraging people to “make the unsafe and illegal trek across the border, ultimately taking the lives of migrants.”

White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernández said the Biden administration has reduced border crossings by more than 55 percent since introducing new restrictions on applying for asylum in June. He called the president’s approach “effective and balanced,” and said that Republican officials are more interested in “dangerous and inhumane political stunts than securing our border.”

Deaths dipped by nearly 40 percent in the state in 2023, but data from Customs and Border Protection show they rose this year.

For the Farías family, crossing the Rio Grande felt like their best choice. They had fled Venezuela for Peru, but quickly realized there would be few opportunities to advance their lives there. Thousands of Venezuelans were wading across the river into Texas and claiming asylum. Angelica’s parents planned to do the same. The Post is identifying the girl by only her middle name because she is a child.

It wasn’t long after they entered the water that another migrant found Angelica clinging to her father’s back as his corpse floated near a pecan orchard called Heavenly Farms. She was alive.

Other people who had been traveling with the family took her to authorities. They told officers her first name. But they knew almost nothing else about her. Her entire family was dead.

For decades, it was mostly men — usually from Mexico or Central America — who braved the river to find work in the United States.

But as gang violence, chronic poverty and political instability grew, many more women and children began making the journey in the mid-2010s. Smugglers spread the word that minors were released quickly and allowed to stay in the United States. By 2014, so many children were crossing the border alone that President Barack Obama declared it an “urgent humanitarian situation.”

Then in 2020 came the pandemic. Migration to the United States plummeted, but a year later, people began making their way to the Rio Grande. Entire families from countries such as Venezuela were arriving. Unlike those who had crossed years earlier, they wanted to surrender to U.S. authorities in hopes of qualifying for asylum.

Migrants are detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents moments after crossing into Eagle Pass 

on Sept. 28. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)


Migrants wait to be processed by Border Patrol agents in Eagle Pass after crossing the Rio Grande on Sept. 28. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Death records reviewed by The Post and its news partners reflect that changing dynamic. More and more people from South American countries began washing up dead in Texas and Mexico. 

In 2022, women made up nearly 22 percent of all deaths, higher than any of the other years examined. At least 75 children drowned in the river from 2017 to 2023.

The Rev. Paulo Alfonso Sánchez, who operates a shelter in Monclova, a city many migrants stop at on their way to Eagle Pass, said that in the fall of 2023 rumors began spreading about various dates by which an asylum-seeker had to reach the United States before Biden would bar them from entering. The information was false, and immigration advocates think it probably came from organized crime groups seeking to stoke urgency.

“It was a desperate situation,” Sánchez said. “Big groups tried to cross, stepping over each other at the riverbank and both sides, U.S. and Mexico, had to rescue people.”



Texas DPS pull migrants in distress from the Rio Grande. [Go to link to see the
harrowing video.]

The Post and its partners documented 858 migrant drownings in Texas from 2017 to 2023, while U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 587 along the entire southwest border during that time. The agency is required under federal law to record how many people die trying to enter the country each year, though federal investigators have acknowledged the data is incomplete.

Asked about the discrepancy, a CBP official noted the challenges in collecting data on migrant deaths, and said the unit tasked with tracking those fatalities has a limited budget, though Congress has offered more funds in recent years.

Sister Isabel Turcios runs Frontera Digna, a migrant shelter in Piedras Negras, and estimates that in 2023, about 4,000 showed up in the city each day. She said most people went straight to the river without resting. Many were afraid of being robbed, beaten or deported by Mexican officials and wanted to leave quickly.

Across the river, migrants now found towering shipping containers, giant buoys in the water and armed troops. They were all part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which the Texas governor launched after accusing the Biden administration of not doing enough to curb illegal immigration.

"Texas supports legal immigration but will not be an accomplice to the open border policies that cause, rather than prevent, a humanitarian crisis in our state and endanger the lives of Texans,” Abbott said in announcing the initiative.

On the Mexican side of the border, migrants encountered more soldiers patrolling the border. Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had deployed thousands of troops to crack down on illegal immigration in response to pressure from then-President Trump. By 2022, there were 11,500 troops stationed along Mexico’s northern border — nearly twice as many as there were three years before.

A spokesperson for Abbott’s office said the state has put up hundreds of miles of barriers such as fences and shipping containers, as well as more than 51 miles of border wall. Reporters from The Post and partner news organizations mapped approximately 250 miles of state and federal security infrastructure using available satellite imagery through 2023.

The mapping of the state’s barriers showed that at least 40 percent of the fences, buoys and other deterrence devices erected as part of Operation Lone Star were concentrated in and around Eagle Pass.

That included a fence near Heavenly Farms. The sprawling property where Angelica’s father was found is about four miles from downtown Eagle Pass and filled with rows of pecan trees. In 2023, more and more bodies were turning up there.



The Texas National Guard patrols the Rio Grande on Sept. 26 near Eagle Pass. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)


Border agents had long patrolled the Rio Grande near the pecan orchard by boat. But migrants still frequently passed through Heavenly Farms after crossing into the United States.

In 2022, Operation Lone Star law officers built a fence along the river near the farm. Soon after, they deployed spools of sharp concertina wire by the banks. And in the summer of 2023, troops placed a thousand feet of large orange buoys on the water close to the property.

Border Patrol agents began cutting Abbott’s concertina wire to reach migrants. They claimed Texas state troopers had blocked their agents from a boat ramp at a municipal park. The standoff shifted from the border to the courts as Texas and the Biden administration took turns suing each other in legal disputes over buoys, wire and river access.

Meanwhile, the number of people found dead in the Rio Grande near Heavenly Farms was rising.





The deaths mapped by The Post and its partners and available satellite imagery show that two drowning victims were found near the farm in the five years before a fence was constructed along the property. Thirty-three victims were discovered in that same area in the two years after the fence was built.

There was the Venezuelan folk musician trying to join his niece in the United States. The man from the Ivory Coast whose family did not find out he was dead for two years. The 6-year-old boy from Colombia who’d lost his mother’s grip as they entered the water.




Large orange buoys float in the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass on Nov. 15, 2023. (Video: Justin Hamel for Lighthouse Reports)

Texas National Guard concertina razor wire, fencing and buoys are seen along the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass on Sept. 27. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The data on drowning deaths alone is not sufficient to show whether any of the new barriers played a role in the deaths. Where people are found does not necessarily indicate where they crossed. But interviews with migrants and shelter operators indicate that more and more migrants were choosing to cross away from Shelby Park, a green space near the city’s downtown where troops were concentrated, to more isolated parts of the river.

Abbott and others admonished migrants for not choosing legal options, such as surrendering at a port of entry. In the fall of 2023, when Angelica’s family crossed, the Biden administration was asking migrants to request an appointment at an official U.S. port of entry through its CBP One app.

Angelica’s parents had registered through CBP One. But that was just the first step in the process. Getting an appointment could take months. And many migrants felt they could not wait. Some had run out of money. Others thought it was too dangerous to stay in Mexico.

Immigrant advocates in Mexico also said Mexican officials and organized crime groups were blocking migrants from accessing border bridges, unless they had an appointment.

For many people, the river felt like the best way to quickly get into the United States.

Migrants cross the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass on Sept. 28. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Angelica’s parents had met working at Venezuela’s Department of Health.

They were both analysts, and they dreamed of building a life together while advancing their careers in the medical field. Zelnays came from a family of three close-knit siblings who had lost their mother when they were all still teens. An aunt, Norkys Farías, had taken them in and continued to raise them as her own.

Miguel Perez Carles fit right into Zelnays’s family. He had a knack for making her laugh with jokes and funny stories. The two gathered frequently with her family in the coastal city of La Guaira to celebrate milestones.

Their daughter arrived in 2019. Zelnays had a son, Santiago, 11, from a previous relationship. Family members said he was a talented soccer player who wanted to attend a specialized academy for the sport.

But their life in Venezuela grew more difficult as hyperinflation skyrocketed and the nation’s economy tumbled. So when her sister left for Peru, they followed.

“They had a vision, as young people do, for the life they wanted to live,” said Lizmar Farías, Zelnays’s cousin. “They wanted to help the family and build a house.”

After some time in Peru, they decided as a group they would have better luck realizing their goals in the United States.

The journey from Lima to the U.S. border with Mexico was difficult. In a group chat with relatives back home, they recounted sleeping on streets as they moved from one country to the next. When they reached Panama, they crossed the perilous Darien Gap, a jungle that is home to jaguars, anacondas and venomous insects. They told their family members that they sat in their tents terrified at night listening to the sounds of animals lurking nearby.

They’d managed to endure all of it by staying united, relatives said.

“They were always together,” Lizmar said. “In photo after photo, at the beach, in the city, at birthdays, they were inseparable.”

They reached the Mexican border with Texas early on Nov. 18, according to interviews with relatives and information from other migrants.

Francisco Contreras, director of the state civil protection services in Piedras Negras, remembers the soaring number of people trying to cross around that time. He said there were groups of 400 or 500 people gathering at different points along the riverbank. The width of the river near Eagle Pass is between 250 and 300 feet.

His team and Mexico’s migrant rescue squad, Grupos Beta, were repeatedly called to help pull screaming children and splashing adults from the water. He said they performed CPR on too many people for him to count.

“You know we always ask them why — why risk their children?” Contreras said. “And they always tell us, they’d rather die here, in this river, than back in their countries.”

Texas Department of Public Safety agents patrolling the river the day Angelica’s family crossed told Maverick County Sheriff’s deputies that about 200 migrants were attempting to cross together from Mexico, according to incident reports.

A group of migrants struggle to cross the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass on Nov. 18, 2023. (Video: Justin Hamel for Lighthouse Reports) [Go to link to see video.]


The family linked arms as a human chain and waded into the Rio Grande with other migrants. As they got deeper into the water, chaos ensued. The relatives got separated.

A Maverick County Sheriff’s Office incident report of the Farías family drowning states that 14 to 16 people “were visualized to have been taken by the river’s strong current.”

A woman who was traveling with the family later told Angelica’s relatives in Venezuela that she saw a man she didn’t recognize holding the child’s hand and leading her to Border Patrol agents. The child had been rescued after someone noticed her clinging to her father’s back. He was dead, and his body floated down the river toward the pecan farm.

Border agents patrolling the river on boats recovered Zelnays’s body from the water. She had a printout of the family’s CBP One registration email in her pocket. The bodies of her siblings, Thailyz and Robiet Farías, were found together near a cement plant’s boat ramp. Angelica’s brother, Santiago, is thought to be in a morgue in neighboring Webb County, but officials are awaiting DNA confirmation.

Word did not reach their relatives in Venezuela for 10 days. A migrant who had been traveling with the family sent them a message on Facebook.

In an instant, Norkys had lost five family members. She had reason to believe Angelica was still alive. But she had no idea how to find her.




A makeshift memorial is set up at a park along the Rio Grande in Piedras Negras, Mexico, on Sept. 26. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)


Angelica’s family in Venezuela scoured the internet for any information about the girl with dark eyes that they knew as “Caraota,” or bean.

Diplomatic relations between the United States and Venezuela are strained, so Norkys and her relatives had to rely on the International Red Cross and consular officials in Mexico to make inquiries. They called every Texas and Mexico number that might have information. For weeks, they could not figure out where she was.

But a worker at a funeral home in Eagle Pass had given them reason to hope. He told them that Angelica’s relatives were dead, but that officials had confirmed to him that she had indeed survived.

A month after her family drowned, Angelica surfaced in the U.S. immigration system. U.S. officials had taken her to a shelter for young unaccompanied migrants. With no relatives in the United States, child welfare advocates began arranging her return to Venezuela. It would take an additional eight months to bring her home.

During that time, the number of people crossing the Rio Grande dropped. Mexican authorities continued to stop migrants from reaching the river, and the Biden administration imposed new restrictions on applying for asylum over the summer.

But many migrants are still wading into the Rio Grande. Migrants interviewed at shelters in the Mexican state of Coahuila, across from Eagle Pass, said Texas troops have begun using rubber bullets and pepper balls to deter them. One pregnant woman showed a Post reporter marks on her belly where she said she had been hit. A spokesperson for the Texas Military Department said Operation Lone Star troops do not use rubber bullets or tear gas.




Angelica reunites with her family at the airport in Venezuela. (Video: Lizmar Farías)

Angelica flew home to Venezuela in August dressed in a pink top and jeans. Her curly black hair was tied up with a matching bow. Norkys and her mother’s cousins waited for her at the airport in Caracas.

When they saw her tiny figure walking through the terminal, they called out: “Caraota!” She turned in their direction and giggled nervously. When she got close, Norkys bent down so that Angelica could see her face up close.

Angelica studied her gray hair and brown eyes. Then she opened her arms. She nestled her face in Norkys’s neck and didn’t let go.

***

Charlotte Alfred, Ariadne Papagapitos, Jason Buch, Michael Gonzalez, Geysha Espirella, Carola Briceño, Jorge Luis Sierra, Priscila Cardenas, Cecilia Diaz, Imogen Piper and Jordan Lindbeck contributed to this report.

The Washington Post, El Universal and Lighthouse Reports spent a year collecting drowning data from every Texas county and Mexican state that lines the Rio Grande for the years 2017 to 2023.
Based on the research of academics, experts and reporters, we identified all the local, state and federal authorities in Mexico and the United States that collect reports or data on Rio Grande drownings. Reporters submitted requests to 165 different authorities in the two countries, ultimately obtaining data from 52 sources. Although challenges were encountered in the United States, data availability and completeness were particularly problematic in Mexico, where neither the federal Mexican Secretariat of Foreign Affairs nor the National Institute of Migration could provide usable data. Additionally, the municipality of Juárez did not provide any data. Decedent age was included in only 16 percent of the cases from Mexican sources.
Data from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Border Safety Initiative Tracking System, which was checked against annual CBP figures, was obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests from Bryce Peterson of the Arizona-based humanitarian organization No More Deaths, University of Texas researcher Stephanie Leutert and from a request by journalist Gabriela Villegas that was published on MuckRock.
Because data came in different formats and layouts, all information was manually entered into standardized spreadsheets and then spot-checked for accuracy. It was deduplicated to remove cases where multiple agencies had reported the same death. To avoid overcounting, drownings that were one day apart, within 1 mile of each other or had spelling variations of the same name were considered matches for duplicate values.
We counted all deaths that occurred directly as a result of an attempt to cross the Rio Grande. This included cases where drowning was a contributing cause of death or where death occurred elsewhere, such as cases where a cardiac arrest triggered by drowning led to death in the hospital. One case in 2016 involved a fetus of 30-31 weeks gestational age who died as a result of the mother’s drowning.
We excluded deaths of U.S. nationals, as well as cases where bodies were recovered with signs of potential criminal involvement, such as gunshot wounds or mutilation.
If geographic coordinates were missing from reports, we geocoded by hand locations wherever possible. Reporters who had travelled to the area reviewed incident reports that used local landmarks or ranch owners’ names to describe a location. If a location was too large (such as a ranch that spans 10 miles along the river), no coordinates were assigned. Ultimately, 551 drownings reported by U.S. agencies were geolocated.
We plotted nearly 250 miles of security infrastructure – including fences, federal border walls, containers, and a floating buoy barrier – along the Rio Grande using satellite imagery through 2023 from Planet Explorer, Google Earth Pro and Maxar Technologies. We distinguished between federal and state infrastructure projects by cross-referencing satellite images with official statements, news reports and witness accounts, and compared satellite imagery from various dates to determine when each barrier was completed. Read the full methodology here.
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By Arelis R. HernándezArelis Hernández is a Texas-based border correspondent on the national desk working with the immigration team and roving the U.S. southern border. Hernández joined the Post in 2014 to cover politics and government on the local desk after spending four years as a breaking news and crime reporter at the Orlando Sentinel. follow on X@arelisrhdz

By Sarah CahlanSarah Cahlan is a video reporter and one of the founding members of the Visual Forensics team. Her work combines open source and forensic technologies with traditional journalism and documentary filmmaking. She shared in a Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on the Jan. 6 insurrection and a Dupont for her coverage of the clearing of Lafayette Square.follow on X@SarahCahlan

Do read this piece in its entirety. It makes abundantly clear that we don't know—or want to know—our own history here in the U.S. By "we," I refer to curriculum developers, historians, folklorists, mainstream artists, politicians, school boards, children's book writers and all the purveyors of American lore.

While in most cases, this is reducible to ignorance, greater honesty would point in the direction of "agnotology," referring to willfully-induced ignorance because doing so is beneficial to the outcome.

This takes me to the proverb about the lions and the hunt: "Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter." The following is the tale of an accounting in its "glory" that has otherwise been occluded for much too long:

"America’s atrocity was carried out not in shadow, but with extensive documentation, in carefully recorded censuses and court cases and wills. To create this database, The Washington Post researched all of the 5,558 men and one woman, Felton, who served in the U.S. Congress and were born before 1840, meaning they came of age before the Civil War. The verdicts on who enslaved people and who did not are based on journal articles, books, newspapers and many other texts, with the vast majority of the information coming from the 1790 through 1860 decennial censuses."

 

C'mon. For real. How can something so flagrant, so hideous, be so buried were it not for something that we might refer to as an assumptive world, which is an alternative universe where such well-researched, widely-acknowledged and respected concepts as "culturally chauvinist curriculum," "curriculum as a tool of colonialism," or drawing on Michael Apple and the late Michel Foucault, "official knowledge" and "technologies of power," respectively, are flatly rejected and dismissed?

I would argue that the lions have always had their own historians, but not the critical mass that they now have skilled with statistical tools, archival data in abundance, credible and transparent research and analysis, tethered to a media landscape with enhanced capacities to expose the ghastly truths of our country's origins and history to the full light of day. 

Even if it makes you feel sad, angry, inconvenienced or annoyed, the truth always liberates—if one allows it to. And what is true for the individual is true for our nation as a whole—as well as for all nations. We are capable as a planetary community of ending all wars, and living peacefully. But never without each of us as individuals exercising love, peace, forgiveness, caring and compassion on a daily basis.

I'm remembering right now the songs from church growing up that I always loved to sing, "Let peace begin with me." And then there was another about "peace like a river in my soul." ♩🎵♪

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

Do check out the actual post to make use of its interactive tools. Excellent work. Long overdue. 

-Angela Valenzuela

More than 1,700
congressmen once enslaved
Black people. This is
who they were, and how
they shaped the nation.

The Washington Post has compiled the first database of slaveholding members of Congress by examining thousands of pages of census records and historical documents

By Julie Zauzmer Weil,

Adrian Blanco

 and 

Leo Dominguez

 | Washington Post

Updated Jan. 14 at 12:03 p.m.Originally published Jan. 10, 2022

From the founding of the United States until long after the Civil War, hundreds of the elected leaders writing the nation’s laws were current or former slaveowners.

More than 1,700 people who served in the U.S. Congress in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries owned human beings at some point in their lives, according to a Washington Post investigation of censuses and other historical records.

Jump to our interactive database

The country is still grappling with the legacy of their embrace of slavery. The link between race and political power in early America echoes in complicated ways, from the racial inequities that persist to this day to the polarizing fights over voting rights and the way history is taught in schools.

The Washington Post created a database that shows enslavers in Congress represented 37 states, including not just the South but every state in New England, much of the Midwest, and many Western states.

Some were owners of enormous plantations, like Sen. Edward Lloyd V of Maryland, who enslaved 468 people in 1832 on the same estate where abolitionist Frederick Douglass was enslaved as a child. Many exerted great influence on the issue of slavery, like Sen. Elias Kent Kane, who enslaved five people in Illinois in 1820, and tried to formally legalize slavery in the state.

William Richardson, for example, a Democrat who fought for the Confederacy, died in office in 1914 after representing Alabama for 14 years. Another Democrat, Rebecca Latimer Felton, a suffragist and a white supremacist, was appointed to fill a Senate vacancy in 1922 and briefly represented Georgia at age 87. The first woman ever to serve in the Senate was a former slaveholder.

[The Senate’s first woman was also its last enslaver]

Enslavers came from all parts of the political spectrum. The Post’s database includes lawmakers who were members of more than 60 political parties. Federalists, Whigs, Unionists, Populists, Progressives, Prohibitionists and dozens more: All those parties included slaveholders.

The most common political affiliation among enslavers was the Democratic Party — more than 600 Democrats in Congress were slaveholders.

While the early Republican Party is associated with abolition, The Post found more than 480 slaveowners who identified as Republicans at some point in their elected careers.

John McLean, an Ohio congressman and, later, a Supreme Court justice, dissented in the notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the high court ruled that Black Americans were not citizens under the Constitution. McLean was once an enslaver. (Library of Congress)

This database helps provide a clearer understanding of the ways in which slaveholding influenced early America, as congressmen’s own interests as enslavers shaped their decisions on the laws that they crafted.

In America, a Child is Shot Every Hour, and Hundreds Die. Here are 13 Young Lives Lost in 2021

Read this and cry. I'm posting this piece from today's Washington Post not because I didn't think we had a crisis, but rather because I suspect that you, like me, don't know that children's deaths due to gun violence are THIS frequent. 

I can only imagine just how difficult it was for Cox, Davies, Johnson and Thebault to research and write this news story. However painful, without question, these stories must be told and heard lest their deaths—lives cut tragically short—be in vain. 

From a policy perspective, without this level of awareness, we're driving blindly. It's beyond sad that our country cares more about guns than gun violence. 

-Angela Valenzuela

In America, a Child is Shot Every Hour, and Hundreds Die. Here are 13 Young Lives Lost in 2021 

The country’s gun violence epidemic is
killing more children than ever. Who they
were matters just as much as how they died.

By John Woodrow Cox

, 

Emily Davies

, 

Lizzie Johnson

 and 

Reis Thebault

  | Washington Post

Jan. 12, 2022

The sisters in Ohio, both in elementary school, were shot by their father. The boy in Texas was shot at home by someone in a passing a car. The ninth-grader in Arkansas was shot at school by a friend. The girl in Kansas was shot by a toddler, who didn’t mean to do it. The teenager in South Carolina shot himself, but he did mean to do it.

All of them were killed in an epidemic unique to the United States, where, on average, at least one child is shot every hour of every day. Many survive, but many others do not. In the nation’s capital, nine children were killed in gun homicides last year. In Los Angeles, 11 were fatally shot. In Philadelphia: 36. In Chicago: 59. Those figures don’t include the hundreds of other kids who died in accidental shootings and by suicide.

Just how many were taken by gun violence last year will remain unknown until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention releases its data months from now. But in 2020, the number exceeded 2,200 — by far the highest total in the past two decades — and 2021′s tally is expected to be worse.

The children featured below are broadly representative of those killed every year in America. Even babies are shot to death, but the vast majority of young victims are teenagers. Black kids are more than four times as likely to die in shootings as White ones, according to CDC data, though White kids are much more likely to use guns to take their own lives.

Often, children killed by bullets are memorialized only by brief news reports or anguished obituaries. But the way they lived matters as much as the way they died.

The 13 children profiled here were funny: the 6-year-old who wanted to be a doctor so she could give shots to all the doctors who had given her shots. They were generous: the 12-year-old who used his chore money to take his family out to McDonald’s. And they were ambitious: the 15-year-old who wanted to be a nuclear physicist.

These are their stories, one for each month of a violent year.

Click on a child to read their story