Open Letter to Eagle Pass Mayor Rolando Salinas, Jr. and City Council Members
February 7, 2024
Dear Mayor Salinas and member of the Eagle Pass City Council:
We the citizens of Eagle Pass do hereby request you ask Gov. Greg Abbott to vacate Shelby Park and return it back to the citizens of Eagle Pass who are the rightful owners of that property.
It is an affront to us as US taxpayers that the governor has seized our public park – which is owned by everyone – to support an extreme partisan political agenda that endangers our families.
This past weekend, our city experienced a frightening spectacle when the governor held a major press event at Shelby Park. Due to his heavy-handed approach and highly-staged Sunday event, and dangerous rhetoric about our border community, armed militias from across the United States were inspired to come into our normally quiet, safe, and peaceful border town.
We have now learned that arrests occurred and several members or allies of the “God’s Army” convoy were heavily armed and planning to commit acts of violence in our community.[1]
We are lifelong residents. This has never happened before. We have never felt unsafe in our border town until this past weekend.
We want to extend our thank you to the Eagle Pass Police Department and Maverick County Sheriff’s Office for protecting us and maintaining peace and civility with this rapidly escalating situation .
Our beautiful and safe public park has been taken away from us, and turned into a military style staging area, now being used as backdrop for political theater by the Governor and out-of-state politicians. Local residents can no longer use it for fishing, kayaking, flea markets, sports, barbecues, quinceañera, or to have our children playing, as we once did daily.
Most importantly, when these politicians speak to the national media to supposedly tell the nation what is happening on the border, they have excluded the voices of the very residents who live here. Why? Because we would tell the story of who we actually are, as a beautiful, quiet and safe city.
They are creating a fiction, and taking our community’s resources to do it. They are telling a dangerous and misleading story about the border, about our safe communities – which crime statistics show are safer on average than most of America – and in doing so, they are inviting in the very danger that they claim to be protecting us against.
Yes our communities are being invaded, but it is not migrants who pose the threat.
The Texas National Guard seizure of Shelby Park is illegal. It has not only blocked federal U.S. Border Patrol agents from entering and patrolling the area, and doing their job, but it has also effectively barred us, the residents and taxpayers of Eagle Pass, from accessing our own public park.
We refuse to be treated as second class citizens in our own town, in our state, in our own country.
We kindly request that you, the Mayor and City Council, publicly request the Governor to relinquish control over Shelby Park and restore our rights and access to this public space. We believe that it is possible to ensure border security without infringing upon the rights of local residents to access our cherished public spaces.
We look forward to a resolution that respects the needs of our community while addressing the concerns of border security. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
The Residents of Eagle Pass and members of the Eagle Pass Border Coalition
[1] DiCasimirro, Gemma, Planas, Antonio. “Tennessee man who was working with militias planned to act as a sniper and attack Southern border, feds say.” NBC News. February 6, 2024.
