JUAREZ, Mexico (Border Report) – Several migrant families ran for cover after Texas soldiers fired non-lethal projectiles at illegal border crossers by the Rio Grande in El Paso on Tuesday morning.
A video taken by Border Report shows a Texas Army National Guard member aiming a rifle from behind barbed wire and firing at least one shot in the direction of the river.
Denise and Antonio, two Venezuelan asylum-seekers, placed a piece of cardboard between two shrubs on the Mexican side of the river to protect their 1-year-old daughter from stray shots. “The shots came from the other side,” Antonio said. “Yes, we are afraid for our baby.”
Kennedy, a Venezuelan man in his 20s, similarly placed a blanket between another set of shrubs to shield a family of eight. “This is to protect them if (the soldiers) fire from over there,” Kennedy said. “They fired and nobody was crossing.”
Border Report reached out to the Texas Military Department for comment and is awaiting a response.
The Texas Army National Guard more than a year ago began placing barbed wire on the levee in front of the border wall to dissuade illegal crossings at a spot where thousands of asylum-seekers had been surrendering to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Confrontations between Guard members and large groups of migrants in El Paso were documented on March 21 and April 12, leading to dozens of foreign nationals being detained on state riot charges. El Paso County judges dismissed most of the charges, leading the El Paso District Attorney to secure state indictments against some of the accused.
Several other small-scale incidents involving the firing of pepper balls have been documented since by El Paso and Juarez news outlets.
On Tuesday morning, some 250 migrants gathered on the Mexican bank of the river waiting for the Guard to let them across or leave the area so they could somehow get past the barrier.
An unidentified Venezuelan man said two pepper balls struck him in the neck and side after he crossed the Rio Grande to plead with the soldiers to let families come across the razor wire. Several groups of migrants had tried to get across earlier in the morning, but the Guard told them to return to Mexico, the man said.
“Imagine if instead of a paintball it had been a (real bullet), it would have killed me,” the man said. When asked if he tried to cross the border to surrender and seek asylum, the man said no. “I went there to tell them about the children here, and they fired left and right.”
Francisco Servin, a photographer for El Heraldo de Juarez, said the soldiers also fired pepper balls at him.
“I came to document the movement of undocumented people,” Servin said. “When I got here people asked me to go down (to the river) because they had been attacked by U.S. authorities. I found a member of the National Guard pointing and shooting toward the Mexican side where the people were. When they see me, the officer points at me and shoots twice without striking me.”
Servin said he felt angry because “they are very aggressive people.”
