‘Situation is getting out of control’: Migrants from Haiti revolt in attempt to escape bus transporting them in Texas

Haitian asylum-seekers being transported in Texas allegedly assaulted US Border Patrol agents in order to escape the bus before being recaptured, according to the local sheriff.

A group of illegal aliens from Haiti was being transported from a makeshift camp on the Texas-Mexico border to a processing center in Brownsville, Texas, on Monday afternoon when some among them assaulted federal agents to take control of the bus, Kleberg County Sheriff Richard Kirkpatrick said.

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“It was at that point, when the driver was [obliged] to pull over, that’s when they were able to force the door open and abscond off the bus,” Kirkpatrick told local ABC News affiliate KIII-TV on Monday night. “Several of them managed to escape custody for a brief moment in time.”

As Border Patrol agents had already called on local law enforcement for assistance, after another scuffle at the side of the road, all of the unruly migrants were taken back into custody, Kirkpatrick said. A bus normally used for prisoner transport was then brought in to take them the rest of the way to Brownsville, escorted by officers from multiple law enforcement agencies, he said.

Some federal agents were reportedly injured during the assault. “This is [a] case in point of the extremely volatile situation ... as the border crisis unfolds,” the sheriff added.

Mainstream media outlets largely ignored Tuesday’s incident and focused instead on footage showing horse-mounted Border Patrol officers confronting Haitian migrants re-crossing the Rio Grande river into the US, having returned to Mexico to procure food. Some officers were accused of having used violent means to round them up, and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told CNN he was “horrified” by footage of the confrontation, saying it “defies all of the values that we seek to instill in our people.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, the White House’s lead on addressing the root causes of the border crisis, said she  supported a thorough investigation of the incident. “What I saw depicted about those individuals on horseback treating human beings the way they were is horrible,” Harris said.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has dispatched more state troopers into the border region to deal with the public-safety issues arising from the migrant crisis, but those officers aren’t allowed to arrest ayone making an illegal crossing. The governor blamed the Biden administration’s “open borders” policies for creating the “chaos” in Del Rio, where some 14,000 Haitian migrants are gathered under a bridge.

Abbott said on Tuesday that President Joe Biden had created a “man-made disaster of inhumanity” by promoting such policies, and that, while Harris is focused on the causes of migration from Central America, the Haitian influx illustrated that asylum-seekers were arriving from many other nations too. By abandoning any pretense of securing the border or enforcing US sovereignty, the administration had triggered a migrant rush “from all across the entire globe, including people coming from more than 150 countries,” Abbott said.

Asylum-seekers have been arriving in increased numbers after last month’s massive earthquake in Haiti and the assassination of its president in July, which has led to political turmoil and worsened the plight of its impoverished citizens.

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