Dear Revolution:

On January 12, near the town of Eagle Pass, Texas, Victerma de la Sancha Cerros and her two children drowned in the Rio Grande, a river which forms much of the border between Mexico and the U.S. Their deaths shocked decent people around the world. 

Eagle Pass is a town of about 29,000 people on the U.S. border with Mexico. Over the past several months this usually sleepy border town has become ground zero of an increasingly tense face-off between federal Border Patrol agents and the Texas National Guard, both of them armed to the teeth.¹

As news of all this was breaking, a team of revcoms pulled together to go to Eagle Pass, to investigate and learn more of the situation there, and to bring revolution to people. This is a report of our first foray.

Fascists Take Over a City Park

Driving into town through Maverick County, you cross miles of flat, dry scrubland, interspersed now and then with lush green farms and cattle ranches. Along the way, you may notice single Border Patrol (U.S. Customs and Border Protection [CBP]) cars parked here and there on the side of the road, facing out, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. They are placed to snare desperate migrants who try to circumvent a CBP checkpoint about 10 miles outside Eagle Pass by crossing through miles of brushy semi-desert on foot. The weather was pleasant during our initial stay, but is scorching hot for most of the year. Thousands of migrants have died in the plains of South Texas, mainly of dehydration and snake bite, attempting desperate journeys like the one to evade the Border Patrol outside Eagle Pass. In 2022, 77 migrants died in Maverick County alone.

Downtown Eagle Pass is atop a gentle slope that ends at the Rio Grande, with the larger Mexican city of Piedras Negras on the other side. The 47-acre Shelby Park separates downtown Eagle Pass from the Rio Grande. Since January 11, the Texas National Guard—armed with assault rifles, Humvee armored cars, boats for patrolling the river, and other weaponry—has occupied and seized control of Shelby Park. It installed eight miles of razor wire in the river, on the riverbanks, and at the gates between the park and downtown Eagle Pass. (It did allow the Shelby Park golf course to remain. When you get up to certain parts of the fencing, you can peer through the razor wire and sometimes see golfers lining up their putts.)

While the federal government controls “chokepoints” in and out of Eagle Pass, the Texas National Guard deployed by the fascist governor Greg Abbott have put Shelby Park on lockdown. They have pushed federal authorities out of the park. The Biden administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the closure of Shelby Park, but has not more forcefully challenged Texas's violation of federal law. Meanwhile, after Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to take over Shelby Park, fascist leader Donald Trump called for Republican governors to support him. Twenty-five of them soon wrote a letter declaring their “solidarity” with Texas in its defiance of the federal government under Biden.

Our crew went to Shelby Park on our first full day in Eagle Pass. We found a handful of fascists outside the park on “high alert.” They thought CBP was going to come in and cut the razor wire, based on rumormongering from fascist news outlets. But that didn’t happen. Kristi Noem, fascist governor of South Dakota, was said to be in the park that day, along with Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, a major leader of Christian fascism nationwide. We stepped into the small mix outside the gate with our banner reading “We Don’t Have an Immigration Problem, We Have an Imperialism Problem.” This stirred up the fascists and compelled Telemundo and Univision to interview us (although it doesn’t seem they aired it).

Getting Beneath the Surface Calm

Downtown Eagle Pass, and in fact just about everywhere we went in town, was quiet and sparsely populated. We had been expecting the entire town to be an armed camp, as news reports from late last year indicated. It was hard to even figure out where the Border Patrol was in the town itself.

One thing that surface quiet may indicate is that the federal government has little initiative here. The conflict between the Texas National Guard and Border Patrol/Homeland Security, between Abbott and Biden, has been described as a standoff, but that standoff seems to be mainly in the courts and media. Whether, and for how long, it will remain that way is yet to be determined.

But with some investigation we began to uncover some of the turmoil churning beneath the surface. As we talked to people around town and did some investigation, it became clear that this area has always been a bi-cultural, bi-national, integrated economy and culture. Most of the people we met downtown are people who live in Mexico. Many are U.S. citizens who can’t afford to live in the U.S. so they live on the Mexican side. Most people we met spoke more Spanish than English. One woman told us that the people who live here are mostly retired, and the younger men are off working either as truckers or on oil rigs. There is no visible evidence of any opposition to Abbott and the National Guard, or the brutal demonization of immigrants. 

From a Cultural Connection to a Death Trap

A business owner and environmentalist told us that between the border wall and “Operation Lone Star,” a massive anti-immigrant clampdown organized by Greg Abbott, “everything’s been destroyed” (along and around the river). He described with great sadness how Shelby Park used to be where “the community and culture connects with the river.” He told us that when the flow rate of the river is high, as it is now, the risk of drowning is much higher, and the barbed wire all along the riverbank becomes a death trap. 

On Saturday, we made a concerted effort to find people who live in Eagle Pass. We went into a skate park where about 30 youth, all Chicano, were having a skateboarding competition. There was an immediate reaction to our banner and agitation (we started by announcing, “We are the revcoms and we’re here to recruit you into the revolution”). One youth in particular was very backward and vocal, saying he has worked at the border and asked, “Do you know how many rapists and drug dealers we stopped?” 

We started agitating on what is really driving people to flee their homes and why they should care about their fellow human beings. As we talked to the youth, there ended up being more divisions among them. A couple of young women said they wanted revolution, and some of the young men started listening and took materials at the end. These are young people who should be, and could be, the backbone of a revolutionary force defending the migrants who are under attack, but right now are getting into the putrid culture of the system. We struggled over all that.

There is an Eagle Pass Border Vigil Coalition, which had placed 700 crosses in Shelby Park to memorialize migrants who died crossing the border in 2023. On their Facebook page, they called for the state of Texas to “stop its abuse of human, environmental, and constitutional rights. Texas must withdraw from Shelby Park and restore the Rio Grande to its natural state by removing the concertina wire, containers, buoys, and the floating barrels wrapped in razor wire from the river and its banks.”

We learned that Eagle Pass will be the first place in the U.S. to see a total eclipse of the sun this spring. There were supposed to be a lot of activities planned in Shelby Park for the throngs of people expected to come down. As of now, all of those have been canceled. The one event that we did see signs for: The rabid Christian fascist Franklin Graham is bringing his “God Loves You” Frontera Tour to Shelby Park on February 28. It seems this fundamentalist lunatic will be allowed into Shelby Park, while all others are kept out. 

Challenging the Way People Think, and What They Do 

There is great need, and great potential, to repolarize for revolution and for people to demand a stop to the attacks on immigrants—not only among people here in Eagle Pass, but on a national and even global level. Our slogans challenge the way people are thinking and going along with this. While there is wrong thinking about the “choices” immigrants have and American chauvinism, there is also a deep well of sympathy for the migrants and the danger they face. And… we dared to go right up to the militarized fascist gates of Shelby Park and call for revolution. When we were filming a video, the guard told us we had to move, because “you can’t call for revolution at the checkpoint!” We didn’t obey. 

The situation in Eagle Pass will get hotter, probably sooner rather than later. Some reports indicate that this weekend a Christian-fascist, anti-immigrant caravan may descend on South Texas and conclude in Eagle Pass. The day before that, a “trail ride” that starts in Mexico and works its way to the San Antonio rodeo is also scheduled to go through Eagle Pass. The legal battle between migrant-hating Texas fascists and the mass-deporting Biden administration has a hearing scheduled for February 8, and is probably on its way to the fascist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s hard to predict what might happen in this situation, but we revcoms will be on the scene—working urgently to repolarize for revolution.