“I pray for those parents fearing that their kids are dead and debating whether or not they’ll be arrested if they go to find out.”
“Border Patrol also on the scene,” he wrote in a widely shared tweet on Tuesday afternoon. William Lopez, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan who studies fear in immigrant communities, immediately worried about the anxieties undocumented parents might experience. But the presence of the agents at the school, in a town with some undocumented residents, gave some observers pause. In the wake of the shooting, CBP agents provided medical assistance and helped with the effort to reunite children with their families. The CBP official told Texas Monthly that it’s “unclear which bullet from which gun” struck the shooter and killed him. One Bortac agent was wounded, but not critically. According to the CBP official, three Bortac agents engaged the shooter in gunfire - with one holding a shield - after entering Robb Elementary along with local and state law-enforcement officers. In all, as many as eighty CBP agents, including some who were off duty, rushed to the school during and after the shooting. Border Patrol agents not in the SWAT unit also rushed to the school, for more personal reasons: their own children were in the building. Bortac (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) is CBP’s’s paramilitary force, an elite group of agents trained to exchange gunfire with cartels. The agents immediately responded, arriving at the school just before noon. That response speaks to the outsized role CBP has in small towns near the border, like Uvalde.Ī CBP official told Texas Monthly that as emergency calls first came in, four agents with CBP’s Bortac SWAT team were investigating stash houses on the border to the west of Uvalde. The alert on Tuesday, however, was horrific: a gunman had entered Robb Elementary School.Ĭustoms and Border Protection agents were among the first to respond to the mass shooting, in which at least nineteen children and two teachers were killed.
Agents often act as first responders to emergencies in their communities.
When Border Patrol radios crackled with a request for aid from local Uvalde police on Tuesday, it was nothing out of the ordinary.