A time constraint lingered over the entire morning, as the buses would load up quickly and then be gone. But there were also a lot of people who were confused, tired, and afraid.

They had questions.

“Can we put the laces back into our shoes?” asked a trio of worn-out looking men. Border Patrol had made them remove their shoelaces and the men were shuffling along miserably.

I said, “Yes, of course you can, and so sorry for that inconvenience.”

A rail thin woman raised her hand, “Just a small question,” she said to me, “I dropped my phone in the river, would there be one of those hand drying machines that I could maybe air the phone out with?”

I told her no, sorry about that, there were no such machines in this transit station.

An elderly woman stepped up, “I too have a small question, I have no money and no family, what I am to do?”

The line moved forward, and she disappeared inside the building, her question left unanswered, at least for the moment.

Another woman was more insistent. She left the line and came up to me with tears streaming down her cheeks.

She told me, “They took my husband from me. I don’t know where he is. I must find him. I can’t leave him here, but I don’t know where he is.”

Her name is Carmen, and she is a young Mexican woman who had just crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States. She and her husband had been fleeing from the violence in their hometown. Her hair was matted, her clothing was filthy, and her tennis shoes caked in mud.

Two days earlier, she told me, the two of them were standing on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, just outside the city of Piedras Negras.

“The Mexican soldiers”, she said, “were helpful. They showed us where to wade across the river, and that we should then go to where the American soldiers were, and they would help us.”

“So we did that. When we got on the other side of the river, the Americans directed us to a break in this fence that lined the riverbank, and we walked through the fence. There were more American police there.  They put us in handcuffs and told us that my husband was under arrest for trespassing,”

“They took my cell phone and my documents. Then they took my husband away and they took me to a sort of office. I was there overnight and then they put me on bus that took me to this place.  No one will tell me where to find my husband.”

“How do I find my husband?” she pleaded, “What am I supposed to do?”

There was no time to help her—the buses would be pulling away soon and she and the other migrants would not have another opportunity to get away from the border. I encouraged her to get on the bus that was headed to San Antonio. Fortunately, in San Antonio, volunteers and city staff had been organized for some time to help migrants. Sadly, the Texas project of persecuting migrants had left many victims seeking help and the San Antonio good people most likely would know what could be done.

She boarded the bus, her tears still falling, her heart in dismay.

In other news, just days after Carmen’s husband had been taken away from her, Greg Abbott had ordered national guard and state troopers to roll out yet more concertina wire on the banks of the Rio Grande, and to place water barriers in the middle of the river. The barriers were designed to cause drowning by anyone trying to cross over, around or under them, wrapped as they are in their own concertina wire.

One brave, or perhaps just thoughtful, individual working as a member of the Department of Public Safety revealed that state troopers had been ordered to force migrants who had crossed the Rio Grande back into the water.

Amongst the targets of this police action were small children, and men and women with babes in their arms.

No one would attempt to cross such a barrier unless it was to flee the worst kinds of violence. It is a particularly demonic kind of selfishness that would booby-trap the way to safety for people under such threat, and yet that is what the governor and his supporters are promoting. In any circumstance I can imagine, such a practice, particularly if exercised by elected leaders can only be judged as bizarre (and criminal).

The governor’s press office defends the implementation of these barbarities as a defense of Texans from the threat that “these people” represent to the residents of the great state.

It is worth noting that the migrants that were trapped by the troopers and their concertina wire were unarmed and were not attempting to smuggle fentanyl into the USA. All they were carrying was fear—and a trust that the United States was a nation whose greatness made a space for people in danger of death.

The governor’s disdain for Carmen and her husband is on the same continuum as that damning contempt for the four-year old migrant that Texas state troopers forced back into the river and that shown the pregnant woman, who, wrapped up in Texas-state concertina wire, miscarried. The cavalier (and perhaps permanent) separation of this couple based upon a manufactured misdemeanor offense is immoral even as the actions of the troopers and national guard are brutal.

We are not a small, petty, cowardly people. The evidence for that assertion abounds daily and throughout the nation. I saw it in Del Rio at the humanitarian shelter and have seen it in many other places.

The vile decisions that created Carmen’s tears of desperation are more than disturbing. They are signs of a willingness of powerful people to engage in a contagious evil that has always been a part of our politics and, likewise, must always be exposed for what it is—a willingness to sell the soul of a state for political expediency.