2023-11-10 04:40:50
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The white Honda Civic was speeding down Highway 57, a rural two-lane road that runs to the Mexican border, after a Texas police officer tried to stop the car. and chased him after he didn’t stop.
High-speed chases of migrants and suspected smugglers have become routine in Texas. But Wednesday’s chase had one of the deadliest endings in recent years: a head-on crash that killed eight people, including Honduran citizens and two Georgia residents.
The twisted remains of the crash near La Pryor, a small town about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of San Antonio, highlighted the danger of high-speed chases waged by border law enforcement, whose presence is increasingly ever greater. Texas alone has deployed hundreds of additional agents over the past two years to stem the flow of migrants and drugs.
The crash also revived criticism that the chases are too fast and that they have continued for a long time even though they have resulted in injuries or deaths. In January, Customs and Border Protection released a new vehicle pursuit policy to increase security.
For some, the changes have not spread widely enough.
“They can mitigate getting into these problems and these high-speed chases that end in deaths,” said El Paso County Commissioner David Stout.
According to Stout, in his border county alone, Texas law enforcement officers have participated in about 500 high-speed chases this year, more than half of which exceeded 160 kilometers (100 miles) per hour.
Authorities had not yet released the identities of the victims Thursday, including that of the 21-year-old driver of the Civic and the vehicle’s five passengers. The Civic collided with a Chevrolet Equinox, which caught fire with a man and a woman inside. Both died.
It is unclear what the maximum speeds the vehicles reached during the chase, which began when a Zavala County police officer attempted to stop the Civic around dawn. The police station had no comment Thursday beyond providing a brief report.
The crash is being investigated by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s extensive border mission known as Operation Lone Star. The department did not immediately provide figures on high-speed chases. But director Steve McCraw did not deny that his own officers have been involved in thousands of chases over the past two years.
A chase can be called off, McCraw said, if it “becomes an unreasonable risk to the public or yourself.” He said officers will also back off if police aircraft arrive to monitor the fleeing vehicle.
“The problem is that when we’ve done that, (the fleeers) continue to drive fast,” McCraw said in an interview Thursday. “So once the chase starts, it’s not like they slow down.”
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union and another civil rights group sent a complaint to the federal Department of Justice over high-speed chases along the Texas border. Citing news reports, the groups said they had counted 30 people killed and 71 injured in chases involving state troopers during the first 16 months of Abbott’s border mission.
Pedro Rios, a director of the advocacy group American Friends Service Committee, has studied the policies of federal agents involved in vehicle chases and believes they should be banned altogether.
“What we have asked is for vehicle chases to end because they can put the safety of not only migrants, but also officers or agents and other passers-by at risk, as in this case,” he said.
The crash in Texas had the highest death toll in a crash involving migrants since 13 people died in a collision in remote Holtville, California, in March 2021. Another chase by local police last year near The Texas border also ended with the death of four migrants.
McCraw said he has never fired a police officer for his actions during a chase.
“I’m sure we’ve had some training or counseling,” he said. “It’s something that happens by nature, because there is a very small difference in whether the speed at which you are driving (is safe or not). And sometimes it may not be as much of a risk to the public as it is to the police officer driving 153 miles per hour down the road.”
In El Paso, Stout said high-speed chases this year have led to more than 60 accidents. He recalled a chase that ended with a car crashing onto a bridge. When two migrants who were in the car got out, they fell into the void and died.
“That’s something that really comes to mind when I think about these things,” he said.
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Gonzalez reported from McAllen, Texas. Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
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