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| We are here at the county seat of Falfurrias, Texas, a small town whose success is largely | |
| due to the developer and pioneer Edward Cunningham Lassiter, who in 1893 owned one of the largest | |
| ranches in Texas at 350,000 acres. | |
| As the San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway expanded south to his ranch in 1904, Lasseter founded Falfurias, an Apache word meaning the land of heart's delight, possibly due to the sweet butter creamery Lasseter developed in 1909. | |
| Or perhaps it refers to filfarias, Mexican slang for dirty and untidy. | |
| One thing is for certain, both meanings apply here. | |
| As the county and local ranchers struggle to bankroll, defend their lives, and bury the bodies of the rising tide of illegals crossing their land every day. | |
| It was the loss of oil and gas revenue. | |
| compounded by the amount that we spend. | |
| And that figure is dealing with autopsies, it's dealing with wear and tear of the vehicles, the sheriff's department, the JP's, the magistrates, the death certificates, all the paperwork that's entailed, getting out to these areas that are very, very remote. | |
| I personally have been taken to pronounce a body when the sheriff officer with me says, oh, there went the transmission. | |
| And we had to call a wrecker to come get us. | |
| Thank God for Border Patrol. | |
| They were able to take us to where the immigrant was. | |
| And a lot of these immigrants are dying of dehydration, is that the main cause? | |
| We refer to them as the elements. | |
| It's compounded by the 100 plus weather degrees out there, rattlesnake bites, and a lot of them we order autopsies because we don't know what was the cause of death. | |
| We now do autopsies on everybody and DNA on everybody. | |
| As far as the immigrants from other parts of the world, can you speak on that at all? | |
| What your experience, what you've seen from say China, India, Russia possibly? | |
| We have reports from the Sheriff's Department. | |
| They can confirm that they've apprehended people from over there and they've also found people. | |
| But the Sheriff's Department is very aware that they are here and they're coming in. | |
| Has violence increased in the past few years as a result of the Aggressive increase in immigrants? | |
| Yes, definitely. | |
| Matter of fact, I just got a report a couple of days ago of a local rancher that they broke into his ranch. | |
| And we are getting more and more reports of either agents that are being accosted or deputies that are finding resistance from these individuals. | |
| They're young. | |
| They're 30 and under. | |
| A lot of them. | |
| Year to date right now, I believe we have 33. | |
| And we're about to go into July and August. | |
| If you're familiar with Brooks County, we've got 944 square miles. | |
| And it's very, very rough terrain. | |
| And of course, being from South Texas, anybody that knows about rattlesnakes, we've got some big ones. | |
| And it's very, very difficult because the antivenom is out of Corpus Christi. | |
| And that means that we'd have to get a helicopter down here and try to get them within that golden hour so we could save their body. | |
| Wow, the cost of that must be staggering. | |
| Of course. | |
| Well, that incurs on the county. | |
| And that's why all these expenses, you know, we don't budget for. | |
| And we've had to, and the law says we have to pay for them. | |
| And have you asked for grants from the federal government? | |
| We have gotten nothing from the federal government. | |
| Governor Perry's office last year stepped up to the plate, and they helped us with $150,000 to share. | |
| We were in Austin, Texas this week, and they're going to help us with another $150,000. | |
| That's to defray a lot of the costs that the Sheriff's Department has. | |
| There was a boom time with the gas and oil and the creamery. | |
| In 2007, when I took office, our taxable value was $1,000,000. $1,093,000,000. | |
| Last year was 541 million. | |
| We've lost more than 60% of our oil and gas. | |
| So that makes, you know, and we live by oil and gas. | |
| In 1959, we were the only one in South Texas that had an all-concrete stadium. | |
| We had four dealerships and we had a hospital. | |
| Are you aware of the administration of Obama, how they're professing to the Central American countries that if you come across the border and Proclaim that you're a dreamer, especially these younger kids that are coming across, that you will receive amnesty. | |
| I think that you can't make the rules just to apply them. | |
| If you're going to be fair, let's be fair to everybody. | |
| If you're going to allow people to come in, you should have standards. | |
| You should have a program in play that would allow them to enter the country legally, not illegally. | |
| Are you aware of the exploding swine flu now in San Antonio and this area? | |
| What's your Health and Human Services doing to take care of that? | |
| Well, we've been there before. | |
| A couple of years ago, the H1N1 was here and we were prepared. | |
| We've got a wonderful medical exam in the valley that keeps us abreast and we always take a proactive approach. | |
| We've got a lot of illegal activity by human smuggling and we've got, it is a problem. | |
| The problem that we've got to contain is that we just don't want people dying in our county. | |
| And so we're trying to do everything humanly possible to stop it. | |
| We've got a good friend of mine that goes out and puts water stations at the ranches so at least they can have water. | |
| How effective has the Border Patrol and Homeland Security been in your county? | |
| We have a wonderful presence of Border Patrol. | |
| They do a great job of drug apprehension. | |
| That's what Brooke County is number one in the nation for. | |
| The only bad part about it, we're not a border county, so we don't qualify for any federal assistance. | |
| And so I've made the scenario many times, including to the governor's office on Tuesday, that if you've got a scenario where Border Patrol agents are following somebody and they get bit by a rattlesnake, they'll take him to the hospital. | |
| They'll put agents there to monitor him. | |
| They'll foot the bill. | |
| But an immigrant dies called Brooks County. | |
| Right. | |
| We were just in Brownsville and McAllen last week and we discovered that the Border Patrol was paying via credit card for illegals that had come in, mainly women with children, babies. | |
| McAllen, Texas is tapping their resources. | |
| It's going to take an effect on their money, on their budget, because you don't budget for stuff like that. | |
| I mean, you can budget some, but at some point, You didn't foresee the amount of immigrants coming over. | |
| Yeah, and they're paying for bus tickets, they're generating power for them, they're putting up tents, they're feeding them. | |
| Wouldn't you say that's exploitation at a high level? | |
| I mean, that's crazy. | |
| If I did something like that, they'd want to put me in jail. | |
| Yeah, absolutely. | |
| It's amazing what the federal government's getting away with. | |
| Well, you've enlightened me to a lot of things. | |
| For the last week, I've been inundated with the mass graves. | |
| And so I kind of now got to get back to it and focus on everything else. | |
| And it's going to get crazy. | |
| Before it gets better, it's going to get crazy. | |
| I'm sure glad you landed here and let everybody know of what's going on in Brooks County, because my heart goes out to McCallen and the County of Hidalgo, because they've got a lot on their plate. | |
| We've had it, like I said, for 65 months, and we wouldn't want to bestow it on anybody else. | |
| And now from that amazing interview with Judge Ramirez here in Brooks County, Texas, we take you to the mass dumping ground here at the Sacred Heart Burial Park. | |
| Who's next? | |
| What town is next to take the brunt of the illegal activity being spread by the federal government into the United States? | |
| Is it your town? |
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