The two-dozen large stones lining the entrance to the Brackettville school buildings might not be the prettiest exterior design choice — but they serve their purpose, said Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe.
"These big, ugly rocks," Coe said, pointing as his truck rolled slowly past the complex, "we had those brought in to try to discourage anybody from wanting to bail out or drive off-road through our campus."
For years, high-speed chases were part of daily life in southwest Texas — and, as a result, so were "bailouts." That's the term for when high-speed pursuit suspects stop — or crash — their vehicle, then "bail out" of the car, attempting to escape.
Bailouts occurred so often a Texas House committee found Robb Elementary School officials were desensitized to the resulting school alerts. In fact, several local law enforcement officials believed initial reports about what turned out to be the 2022 mass shooting at Robb, were, at first, reports of a bailout.
Fewer migrant encounters at the border over the past year likely led to a decline in both state and federal law enforcement vehicle pursuits. But four months into President Donald Trump's second term, it remains to be seen whether his border approach will lead to fewer high-speed chases — or if they'll become a symptom of stricter immigration enforcement.
Kinney County is in U.S. Customs and Border Protections' Del Rio border sector. Not only did Border Patrol migrant encounters at the southwest border reach a record high in fiscal year 2021, encounters went up more than 500% in the Del Rio sector compared to the year prior.
That tracks with a spike in pursuits Coe said he noticed.
"We used to call them 'focus sectors' because they would have influxes in San Diego or Tucson, the Yuma sector and the (Rio Grande) Valley," said Coe, a former Border Patrol officer. "Never Del Rio. And all of a sudden, Del Rio became the focus sector. And the Del Rio sector was never prepared for it."
Texas Department of Public Safety troopers were involved in 1,683 pursuits in counties on or close to the border in 2022 — the peak over the past five years, according to department data.
Migrant encounter numbers remained high throughout the first three years under former President Joe Biden, with another spike in late 2023. The U.S. also saw more immigrants escaping rising turmoil in countries other than Mexico, like Venezuela and Haiti.
The vast majority were asylum seekers arriving at higher rates for the same reasons that have historically driven immigration, said University of California, Davis political science professor Brad Jones.
"You can always point to some sort of really bad conditions that they're trying to get away from, whether that's economic conditions, whether that may be climate-related, whether it deals with state violence or drug violence or criminal violence or even domestic violence," Jones said.
Then those numbers started to decline after Biden barred asylum for people who immigrated unlawfully and made other efforts to curb immigration from the southern border last summer. Around the same time, the Mexican government ramped up its border enforcement and kept migrants from going north.
Those factors likely led to the initial rise and more recent decline of high-speed chases in border counties, both for Border Patrol and local agencies. But Texas' own immigration enforcement efforts may have contributed to more vehicle pursuits at that time — and the dangerous consequences, immigrant rights groups say.
Abbott touts his Operation Lone Star initiative, launched in 2021, as the solution to the human and drug smuggling along the Texas-Mexico border he said Biden's immigration policies failed to control. Texas deployed DPS officers and the Texas National Guard to the border in what's now a more than $11 billion-dollar initiative.
At the same time, DPS-involved vehicle pursuits in border counties more than doubled between 2020 and 2021.
Immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility, but under Operation Lone Star, authorities charge people suspected of crossing the border illegally with criminal trespass.
Critics say the state unlawfully uses those misdemeanor arrests as its vehicle for de facto immigration enforcement. And Gov. Greg Abbott has made clear his willingness to collaborate with the administration on immigration enforcement.
Under Sheriff Coe, Kinney County arrested more people under Operation Lone Star than any other county between 2021 and 2023, according to an ACLU of Texas report last year.
The ACLU, international rights organization Human Rights Watch and others have called for an end to Operation Lone Star since its inception.
Along with concerns over vehicle pursuit deaths, they cite evidence pointing to DPS racially profiling Hispanic drivers during traffic stops and unlawfully detaining migrants. Dozens of misdemeanor trespass charges made under Operation Lone Star were vacated months later.
Reform advocates argue harsher enforcement isn't the answer. There are other, safer ways of catching people suspected of crimes or immigration offenses than pursuits, said Vicki Gaubeca, associate director of immigration and border policy at Human Rights Watch.
"We're just basically shutting the door down to the U.S.-Mexico border," she said. "That in and of itself doesn't solve the root causes of why people are coming here. It basically just closes the door and forces people to go around ports of entry or into more remote regions of the U.S.-Mexico border to get in, when all they're trying to do is make a better life."
Despite those criticisms, Del Rio Police Chief Frank Ramirez attributes the recent drop in pursuit numbers to the increased state and federal law enforcement presence at the border.
"We have really large sections of the military down here," Ramirez said. "And if they can't get past the first border, then they're stopping a lot of it right there, and it's not going to get to the point where it becomes a danger for us."
Amid overarching national and state policy came an internal change under Biden that the Trump administration quietly reversed earlier this year.
CBP adopted a new vehicle pursuit policy in 2023 in response to criticism over deadly pursuits. It provided more of a framework for border patrol officers to assess risks associated with pursuits.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide have adopted similar philosophies to cut down on police pursuits' risk to innocent bystanders. But the policy came under fire from immigrants' rights groups who said it didn't go far enough — and from border patrol agents who said the policy would tie their hands on the job.
CBP Acting Commissioner Pete Flores rescinded that directive in January once Trump took office and replaced it with the agency's old policy from 2021. It encourages officers to weigh the need to arrest someone against the potential risk to those involved and those who aren't, but it lacks the 2023 policy's restrictions on when officers can chase.
The 2021 policy will remain in place until CBP publishes updated guidance, a CBP spokesperson wrote in a statement to KERA News. The statement did not specifically explain why the policy was rescinded, but it said a working group of CBP leaders recommended drafting a new policy that "reflected the CBP mission and the presidential directive to secure the border and safeguard Americans."
"In all our enforcement policies, we balance the requirement to secure America while preventing unintended consequences," the agency said. "CBP's core mission is to safeguard all Americans, and that guides not only our operations but every policy we put in place."
It's unclear how much the Biden-era policy on chases contributed to the eventual dip in pursuits Texans experienced, though law enforcement reform advocates mostly lauded the change.
With Trump's swift crackdown on immigration this year, there's evidence Border Patrol pursuits could remain low. As of April 21, there have been roughly half as many DPS-involved pursuits on the border in 2025 compared to the same time period last year.
But Uvalde Police Chief Homer Delgado said after conversations with CBP, he suspects more dogged prosecution of suspected human smugglers with warrants out for their arrest will spur more pursuits.
"When we get behind those vehicles, they don't want to be prosecuted. They don't want to go to jail," he said. "So, we're anticipating a lot more pursuits that are going to be happening once they start aggressively prosecuting these people for past crimes, including crimes that they're doing today."
However things play out, local law enforcement say they're better prepared for how pursuits affect their community — underscoring the residual trauma from pursuits, bailouts and the Robb Elementary shooting.
For Sheriff Coe in Kinney County, that means looking out for the kids.
"That's why there's no pursuits in town," he said. "There's no traffic stops that we think may turn into a pursuit in town, just to protect those kids."
Got a tip? Email Toluwani Osibamowo at tosibamowo@kera.org. You can follow Toluwani on X @tosibamowo.
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