Locals reflect on the years of illegal immigration that resulted in high speed car chases, home break-ins, and school lockdowns.
BRACKETTVILLE, Texas—The chaos caused by millions of illegal immigrants flooding across the southwest border under the Biden administration left scars on this border town.
The constant high-speed chases, buzzing helicopters, screaming emergency sirens, hurried school lockdowns, torn barbed-wire fences, and decomposing bodies on ranches and along the Rio Grande all took their toll on Texas towns near the Mexican border.
The border crisis drained resources and changed the lifestyle of Brackettville, a little town with two traffic light intersections in Kinney County. Residents of the county and beyond said the madness stopped almost overnight after President Donald Trump took office.
Now they say the chaos of illegal immigration has just moved into the country’s interior to places that include Minnesota.
Illegal border crossings plummeted to record lows after Trump took office. In fiscal year 2025, Customs and Border Protection reported 443,000 encounters at the southwest border with Mexico.
In 2024, that number stood at a little less than 2.5 million.
‘Back to Mayberry’
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 people per year moved through the county in 2022 and 2023.
Images of illegal immigrants were caught on game cameras meant to give ranchers photos of deer and wildlife on their property, which allowed Coe to estimate the traffic.
“If we hadn’t stepped up when we did in the way we did—I think it would totally destroy the county, had the wave of illegal immigrants continued,” he told The Epoch Times.
Brackettville sits north of the Border Patrol checkpoint on U.S. Route 57 past Eagle Pass and west of the Uvalde checkpoint, making it an ideal location for gotaways, or illegal immigrants who evade capture.
“It’s really a geographical thing with the checkpoint locations to some degree,” Brent Smith, Kinney County attorney, told The Epoch Times.
The area attracted state and national attention as a hot spot for high-speed chases involving smugglers during the border crisis.
The depth of the problem along the smuggling corridor was the subject of an Epoch Times documentary: “Gotaways: The Hidden Border Crisis.”
But now, ranchers are not spending all their time repairing fences, picking up dumpsters full of discarded water bottles and clothing, or worrying about who might walk out of the brush.
They no longer have to black out their windows in fear that the light will attract unwanted nighttime visitors. Families are once again accompanying hunters to their deer leases, Smith said.
“So, it’s kind of back to Mayberry,” Coe told The Epoch Times, referring to the idyllic small town featured in the 1960s TV series “The Andy Griffith Show.”
Matt Benacci, a school board member for Brackett Independent School District, said life has returned to normal at the district’s K–12 campuses as well.
School lockdowns have all but stopped, he told The Epoch Times.
During the border crisis, schools would sometimes have to lock down two times per day because of smugglers bailing out of vehicles and running on foot through the town, he said.
A car of gotaways once jumped the curb onto school grounds and the occupants fled, and one illegal immigrant tried the gym doors to get inside the school, he said.
Brackett Independent School District placed giant stones along the perimeter of its schools to serve as barricades to protect against future incidents.
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