Steller: On polarizing border issues, politics trumps all

Long before anyone could investigate what happened to two Border Patrol agents found along I-10 in Texas, alarmists claimed to know the answer.

The agents’ union, the National Border Patrol Council, said the agents had been attacked, with a Tucson-area representative specifying that illegal border crossers seeking a better life probably did it. U.S. Rep. Martha McSally said one had been “murdered.” President Trump followed suit and used the case as a justification for his proposed border wall.

Predictably, their conclusions were premature at best, wrong at worst.

The FBI announced Wednesday it found no evidence that the two agents were attacked, shooting a cannonball through the credibility of those who jumped to politically useful conclusions. Agent Rogelio Martinez died from injuries suffered in the incident, while a fellow agent was severely injured.

“To date none of the more than 650 interviews completed, locations searched, or evidence collected and analyzed have produced evidence that would support the existence of a scuffle, altercation, or attack on November 18, 2017,” the agency’s El Paso office said in a written statement.

The alarmism was predictable. It’s been a growing feature of life in the border region and spreading beyond for years, especially with Trumpism taking over red-state America.

Still, while those who indulge in alarmism should be held to account, there’s also the issue of overreaction on the other side, by people geared up to fight Trump on the border. We saw it in Pima County last week, when supervisors quickly rejected a border-related federal grant.

But first, let’s specify exactly who took a tragedy and turned their credibility into a farce.

In November, Chris Cabrera, a union spokesman, called the Texas incident an “ambush.”

“It was a brutal attack,” he said. “This was something well thought out and planned. They executed their plan.”

In the initial days after the incident Art Del Cueto, a union vice president based in Tucson, said the incident showed “you hear the talk about individuals trying to ... enter this country to get a better life, but the reality is they will stop at nothing including killing a federal agent.”

Even after an autopsy last week came out showing that Martinez had suffered broken bones and trauma on the right side of his head and shoulders, Brandon Judd, the union president, came to different medical conclusions, telling Fox News: “They were probably running into the culvert, attacked from behind, hit in the back of the head, which is where both of their injuries were sustained.”

The problem isn’t that the union leaders suspect an attack. That remains a possibility, even though the FBI found no evidence for it. The problem is that they are so committed to Trump and his vision of the border as a violent place needing more walls, agents and guns that they are unable or unwilling to resist jumping to a politically beneficial conclusion.

They are so committed that they can’t be trusted to tell the truth.

Rep. McSally also jumped to conclusions, saying in a Nov. 19 statement, “The senseless death of Border Patrol Agent Rogelio Martinez, who was murdered along our southwest border in Texas, should be a wakeup call to our country that we must have the resolve to secure our border and protect Americans from deadly threats like these.”

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This was soon after the incident, and her office told me she, as chair of the House border and maritime security subcommittee, was privy to information that the rest of us weren’t. Obviously, in retrospect, that information was inaccurate.

And of course, Trump weighed in his bombastic way via Twitter: “Border Patrol Officer killed at Southern Border, another badly hurt. We will seek out and bring to justice those responsible. We will, and must, build the Wall!”

The allure of the martyr story was too strong.

But that isn’t to say there isn’t a related phenomenon on the political left. It came into view Tuesday when the Pima County Board of Supervisors considered the routine business of accepting $1.4 million in federal grants as part of Operation Stonegarden.

This program funnels money to border-area police departments, allowing officers to get paid to work overtime, often patrolling more remote areas of their jurisdictions and smuggling corridors.

“Typically, it would be working along the border areas in areas that are more remote and that we are able to patrol less frequently,” Sheriff Mark Napier told me. “Sasabe, Arivaca, the areas adjoining the Tohono O’odham Reservation, Three Points, Ajo. The normal deputy during his day, because of the service demand, doesn’t get to those service areas very frequently.”

Some critics don’t like Stonegarden, which has existed more than a decade, because it can draw local police into immigration enforcement, making it less likely that some immigrants, especially those in the country illegally, will call police when emergencies happen. Others don’t like it because the officers’ pay can go up so much that it ends up spiking their eventual pension income, strapping cities and counties even more.

But none of that was clearly debated in the supervisors’ meeting Tuesday. Chair Richard Elías introduced the items approving the grants by saying “This is about further militarizing our border. This is also about us putting our sheriffs in the position of starting to enforce immigration law on the border.”

Supervisor Sharon Bronson briefly questioned the county’s financial obligation. And then less than 3½ minutes later, the discussion was over. The county board had surprisingly voted 3-2 not to accept $1.4 million in grant funding that would have put deputies out on patrol more often.

Why? Basically, the answer was Trump: “Business is being done differently on the border now,” Elías told me Thursday. “I think we should take note of that in our dealing with the deputies.”

But Supervisor Ramon Valadez, who voted to reject the grants on Tuesday, later reconsidered. Now he’s asking that the supervisors take another vote on the grants at the next meeting, Feb. 20.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Valadez paused about five seconds after his name was called to cast his vote. Then the political instinct kicked in and he voted to reject the grants.

But that wasn’t the end of the issue for Valadez. He gathered more information and reconsidered his position later in the week, which will likely end up bringing the funding back to Pima County.

We can only hope the border alarmists would do the same: Pause before jumping to conclusions, ponder, and when they’re shown they may be wrong, reconsider.