(Trends Wide) — The state of Texas began deploying a floating marine barrier on the Rio Grande River on Friday in an attempt to deter migrants from crossing the US-Mexico border, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.
Abbott posted a 15 second video on Twitter showing buoys being loaded from trailers that will be deployed in the river near the border town of Eagle Pass. The Texas Department of Public Safety will monitor the deployment, the governor said in Friday’s tweet.
The buoys were loaded from trucks and installed in the Rio Grande this Friday. (Texas Department of Public Safety)
Abbott, a longtime critic of the Biden administration’s border policies, announced the plan last month that the state would deploy a 1,000-foot floating barrier.
During the announcement, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Col. Steven McCraw, touted that the buoy barrier could be “quickly deployed” and said it is mobile. He explained that the buoy would be anchored to the bottom of the waterway, adding that the buoys are approximately 1-2 meters high, depending on the water level.
There are “ways to get around” the floating barrier, but “it takes a lot of effort, specialized skills and equipment to do it,” McCraw said last month.
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The new barrier comes after a series of drownings of migrants in the Rio Grande in recent days that left four people dead, including a baby, according to authorities.
Texas Department of Public Safety
Last weekend a woman and a girl were found unconscious in the river, said Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety. A dead man and woman were found on Sunday and Monday, respectively, he added.
In recent years, migrants have resorted to increasingly risky, and often fatal, paths to evade detection and enter the U.S. In March, a migrant was found dead among a dozen stowaways in a train car near from Eagle Pass.
In 2022, a member of the Texas National Guard drowned in the Rio Grande while trying to rescue a woman crossing the river. That year was the deadliest for migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, with at least 748 people killed at the border, Trends Wide reported. Immigrant rights advocates have attributed the rise in border deaths to policies that have made it harder for immigrants to seek refuge in the United States.
Trends Wide’s Raja Razek contributed to this report.
