DEL RIO, Texas — I’ve been to Texas many times. Those Lone Star trips were confined to the habitat of American salesman.

Cookie cutter hotels, training rooms, frigidly chilled convention centers, and that blast of Texas heat whenever you venture outside.

A recent trip changed all that. I traveled from San Antonio through Uvalde to the Del Rio border sector and into Mexico. After years of writing on sanctuary city and immigration policy in Massachusetts, I went to the recent source of the Healey Hotel chaos and took it in with my own eyes.

No reporting, no book, no film, no think tank analysis prepared me for what I saw. It’s true everything is bigger in Texas, including emotions.

The biggest, most common chord struck again and again was sadness and frustration. Sadness and frustration with our leaders amid the vastness of rural Texas. It settles over you like titanic gloom.

A local judge, and former prosecutor who grew up playing in the Rio Grande River took some time to talk. In one day in her courtroom, she may need as many as nine interpreters. Among the huddled masses yearning to be free is a criminal element.

“There has been a change in the type of person coming into the U.S. There are some good people, but there are many, many bad people,” she told me. “I have seen with my own eyes defendants from the Ivory Coast, Albania, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Kosovo.”

Most are from Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, China, and Somalia. She called them “entries without inspection.”

Some, she added, were on the No-Fly list. “So, help me we’ll see another 9/11 before this is over,” she added.

Inside a Texas barbecue barn, 72-year-old rancher Wayne King spoke plainly.

“I’m going to put most of the blame on the Democrat side, but it’s still on the Republican side too. It’s both parties. They forgot what they’re up there for. We the people hire them to do the work, but they think we (the people) work for them,” he told me.

These days he encounters more holes in his fence than ever on his 8,365-acre JP Ranch.

He must check 22 miles of fence every morning. He repaired so many holes that he was able to recognize different coyotes — cartel guides for human smuggling — by their signature style of their breach.

He estimates a loss of between $300,000 and $400,000 of his specialty exotic hunting ranch breeds that have escaped through the cartel gaps.

“I have been woken up by cartels in all black and camouflage at three in the morning. I don’t mess with ‘em,” he said. It is this lurking danger which weighs most heavily on residents.

Asked what he might say to the politicians, like Gov. Maura Healey and Mayor Michelle Wu who champion sanctuary policies, Wayne cocked his head back and fired, “You’re gonna get a taste of it. You can sanctuary all you want, but New York, Chicago, and Denver are finding out it doesn’t work out too good.”

Joe Frank Martinez, Democratic Sheriff of Val Verde, County, since 2009 with a 47-year career in law enforcement and a member of the Texas Border Sheriff’s Association flipped through a binder of drowned migrants who were pulled under the treacherous Rio Grande River. He bemoaned their deaths, the crime which has plagued his community, and policies that lure the horde of travelers to cross the river.

Asked about the Senate Border Bill he was frank, “After digging deep down into it, it had a lot of hidden stuff in there that probably wouldn’t work. It sounded good on the face of it.  It had a lot of compromises that we couldn’t afford to live with.”

Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith, a Republican, holds office between the towns of Eagle Pass and Del Rio, as he describes his district as the 17 border miles between “the two towns you always see on TV with the illegal alien problem.”

He took office in 2021 as President Joe Biden opened the border floodgates.

“The (migrant) traffic we immediately saw was astounding. We declared a countywide state of emergency. In 2020 there were 200 criminal prosecutions for the entire year.  In 2023 there were 6,900 prosecutions in my county office, because we began to prosecute criminal trespass of illegals on the ranchers’ property with Texas State Troopers. We’ve only got 3,200 residents in this county,”  he added.

Kinney said illegal immigration is the “main issue in the upcoming election.”

“I grew up here. I know the ranchers. Whenever I see people, I know and love getting their livelihoods destroyed, I have to work for the people,” he said, adding it’s his job to “ensure justice is done.”

One last question, would you consider moving to Massachusetts and running for governor? Mayor of Boston, maybe?

Lou Murray is a citizen of Boston and a frequent contributor to the Boston Herald oped pages.  He tweets on the X platform @LouisLMurrayJr1.

Disposable diapers left behind in a park in Texas on the border. (Lou Murray photo)