How at least 50,000 illegal immigrants have changed once-rural East Texas hinterlands for the worse
AUSTIN, Texas — A Mexican national is on the run after slaughtering a family of five Hondurans next door, including an 8-year-old child, in a small Texas town a two-hour drive east from here called Cleveland.
American news media report the murdered parents had asked their next-door neighbor to stop firing his semi-automatic rifle at 11 p.m. on April 29 because they were trying to put a baby to sleep. Two other children survived under the bodies of their parents, who died shielding them.
But what no media has yet reported is that this horrific crime happened in what is regarded as America’s largest settlement of illegal immigrants, one literally exploding in population amid a U.S.-government fomented mass migration border crisis. In Liberty County, and now spreading into neighboring San Jacinto County where the massacre occurred, old-timers have been fleeing a new diversity of violent crime, murder, all-night weapons firing, and cartel drug trafficking that has boomed alongside the population. Indifferent U.S. immigration enforcement agencies leave this area to itself.
My recently released book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, dedicates a chapter of reporting to this massive illegal immigrant “colonia” as a warning to America about the coming consequences of an unfettered mass migration event now in its third unmitigated year that has already seen more than five million foreign nationals settle into U.S. towns and cities. Following are edited excerpts from the chapter “Forever Impacts”.
* * *
“The originals” of Liberty County, Texas — the self-descriptor of lifelong Anglo residents like Jimmy Rollins, who trace their lineage to early settler families — have mostly fled what they regard as ruinous, irredeemable change.
Settlement in the county wilderness some 40 miles northeast of Houston dates to the 1830s and 1840s and boomed a bit when an oil field was discovered there in 1925, but still didn’t much change the cherished small-town closeness, long lonely country lanes through uninterrupted timberland, the hunting and fishing subsistence lifestyle, and tiny high school graduating classes.
Until very recently, the loggers, train mechanics, ranchers, and state prison workers made their homes in and around Liberty County’s quaint old townships carved out of dense pine forests with names like Plum Grove, Cleveland, Dayton, and Splendora. They raised each other’s barns and dug one another’s wells.
Now 72, Jimmy Rollins was still farming near Dayton when I met him in May 2022. Just like his father, who was born and lived until he was buried at age 95 in Plum Grove, Rollins recalled riding a horse every Sunday to church and to school as a kid, “barefoot until junior high”, and he raised his own family much the same way, by farming and following a rural country code of life.
“It was all country people. We got our meat out of them woods there. They was behind in time, but everybody pretty much knew everybody,” Rollins recalled. “I enjoyed living here.”
Not anymore.
By Todd Bensman
