Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Border Patrol Agents Killed the Uvalde School Shooter. But Why Were They on the Scene?

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But as the news came in, the heavy presence of CPB agents led some on social media to loudly question why immigration officers were so prominent on the scene. (Some of the posts conflated CBP with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)

The agents’ presence at the school was easily explicable: they are everywhere in Uvalde. CBP’s white and green SUVs are familiar sights around the town, which is fewer than eighty miles from northern Mexico, and thus well within the hundred-mile “border zone” where CBP operates. Like many Texas towns in this zone, Uvalde hosts a permanent CBP checkpoint, where agents stop and inspect vehicles going north along the highway. In a town of about 15,000, CBP is a major employer, offering about 150 unionized jobs with solid salaries and government benefits. Many residents have at least one family member or friend who works for the agency.

Those who saw Border Patrol agents at Robb Elementary School had reasons to be skeptical. But the reality is that across the Texas border region, Customs and Border Protection is a fact of life. In small towns, when someone calls 911 to report a medical emergency or an active crime, Border Patrol agents often arrive sooner than overwhelmed local first responders. (The agency is one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies in the world; it employs almost twice as many people as the FBI.) Because CPB draws employees from local populations along the border, the agents are also more than 50 percent Hispanic. It’s hard to overstate the ubiquity of the agents in southern Texas. In a place like Uvalde, they’re not just in town; in some respects, they are the town.