DPS CONTINUES TO DAMAGE CAMERON COUNTY COMMERCE

By Juan Montoya
In the days when Carlos Cascos was still Cameron County judge, he made it a point to meet with the bigwigs of the Texas Dept. of Public Safety to find out why they were so gun-ho about ticketing 18-wheeler traffic coming off Los Tomates Bridge from Mexico.
In fact, the citations were so many on the truckers that the county considered placing a Justice of the Peace office there to handle the volume of tickets generated by the troopers.
And these weren't just your garden variety tickets, either. Each one of those infractions generated $100s, if not $1,000s of dollars in fines.
Mexican truckers, Cascos told the DPS honchos, were driving truck traffic to Pharr where the DPS enforcement was normal.
Cascos was told that the enforcement in Cameron County – and the bridge at Los Tomates specifically – was being used as a training ground for new troopers where the rookies could cut their teeth and learn about issuing traffic citations. Kids will be kids, of course, and the new guys, eager to please their superiors, sometimes went overboard.
Even after Cascos protested to the DPS that it was affecting commerce and bridge revenues, the trooper honchos, sure of their political support in Austin, would continue to train their rookies ticketing truckers in Cameron County.
Just a few days ago, a county administrator was driving to San Benito and noticed a long line of 18-wheeler – U.S. and Mexican trucks alike – pulled over to the truck rest area by these same DPS troopers. They were all undergoing a stringent safety and equipment check on all the trucks. In their zeal, they probably found multiple peccadilloes that will cost the trucker, or their companies, thousands of dollars that will end up in the state coffers.
Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw said last year that he was trying to rotate officers from around the state in and out of the border counties.
McCraw said that since August, 124 new troopers have been sent to the border region, including many who had previous law enforcement experience and graduated from an abbreviated department trooper academy last summer. About 140 new cadets are currently in training.
“We can’t take all 140 and put them down there because, in effect, [they] would be rookie troopers,” he said. “It would be unfair, plus it doesn’t provide us the capability and coverage we’d like to have in that regard.”
The DPS was responding then to a surge of tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants that had crossed into Texas. The Legislature’s $800 million appropriation was designed to create a permanent presence, including more homegrown officers.
So as far as Cameron County – and Brownsville in particular – is concerned, we should accept that the abnormal and overzealous enforcement by DPS rookies will continue to impact the flow of commerce in the area and no one will have anything to say about it.