>>16348703 Anon Uvalde shooting dig, con't.
>Uvalde is fewer than eighty miles from northern Mexico, and thus well within the hundred-mile “border zone” where CBP operates.<
Border Patrol Agents Killed the Uvalde School Shooter. But Why Were They on the Scene?
""Customs and Border Protection is a ubiquitous presence in many Texas communities, and agents are often first responders.""
When Border Patrol radios crackled with a request for aid from local Uvalde police on Tuesday, it was nothing out of the ordinary. Agents often act as first responders to emergencies in their communities. The alert on Tuesday, however, was horrific: a gunman had entered Robb Elementary School.
Customs and Border Protection agents were among the first to respond to the mass shooting, in which at least nineteen children and two teachers were killed. That response speaks to the outsized role CBP has in small towns near the border, like Uvalde.
A CBP official told Texas Monthly that as emergency calls first came in, four agents with CBP’s Bortac SWAT team were investigating stash houses on the border to the west of Uvalde. The agents immediately responded, arriving at the school just before noon. Bortac (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) is CBP’s’s paramilitary force, an elite group of agents trained to exchange gunfire with cartels. Border Patrol agents not in the SWAT unit also rushed to the school, for more personal reasons: their own children were in the building.
But as the news came in, the heavy presence of CPB agents led some on social media to loudly question why immigration officers were so prominent on the scene. (Some of the posts conflated CBP with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which did not respond to the shooting.)
The agents’ presence at the school was easily explicable: they are everywhere in Uvalde. CBP’s white and green SUVs are familiar sights around the town, which is fewer than eighty miles from northern Mexico, and thus well within the hundred-mile “border zone” where CBP operates. Like many Texas towns in this zone, Uvalde hosts a permanent CBP checkpoint, where agents stop and inspect vehicles going north along the highway. In a town of about 15,000, CBP is a major employer, offering about 150 unionized jobs with solid salaries and government benefits. Many residents have at least one family member or friend who works for the agency.
PICREL and full page cap
LINK to article:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-patrol-uvalde-shooter/
1/2