Greg Abbott placed razor wire on the border and caused a pregnant teen to miscarry

Greg Abbott placed razor wire on the border and caused a pregnant teen to miscarry. The cruelty is the point.

Rolls of razor wire Texas installed along the U.S. side of the Rio Grande have ensnared several migrants, including a pregnant woman “in obvious pain” while having a miscarriage and a father trying to free his child “stuck on a trap” of razor wire–covered barrels in the water, a Texas state trooper wrote in July 3 email to a superior, the Houston Chronicle reported Monday. The trooper, stationed in Eagle Pass, said Operation Lone Star service members have been ordered to push children back into the Rio Grande and told not to give water to asylum seekers even as Texas sweltered in extreme heat.

He recounted seeing National Guard soldiers push a 4-year-old girl trying to cross the razor wire back into the river “due to the orders given to them,” adding that the girl then passed out from exhaustion in temperatures “well over 100 degrees.” The 4-year-old girl, 19-year-old pregnant woman, and others lacerated by the razor wire or injured trying to avoid it in the June 30 incidents were transferred to emergency medical services, the trooper wrote. The cruel embrace of the spikes offered 19th century settlers the solution they’d been looking for to stake their claims out west: a fence that kept cattle in, and undesirables out. Unsuspecting wild buffalo and longhorns often became ensnared, thrashing their bodies against the wire, not knowing that the more they struggled, the more they’d suffer. If hunger or thirst didn’t kill them, infections from their festering wounds would. Over countless wars, that design has been perfected into even more barbaric forms, including razor wire — the kind that Gov. Greg Abbott has strung along the Rio Grande as part of his billion-dollar border security initiative. 

The war we’re fighting now, Abbott and his cronies argue, is at our southern border. And the enemy? Smugglers and organized crime, of course. But also, desperate families of men, women and children, many seeking asylum. That includes an unsuspecting 19-year-old who became trapped in wire and writhed in pain while suffering from a miscarriage. 

A man who tried to free his child from the unrelenting teeth of a razor-wrapped barrel and earned a “significant laceration” on his left leg.

A 15-year-old boy who broke his right leg in the currents because the razor wire was “laid out in a manner that it forced him into the river where it is unsafe to travel.”