Robb Elementary students were used to school lockdowns. Between February and May of 2022, the Uvalde, Texas, school had been secured or locked down 47 times.
But when a lockdown alert came on May 24 — the day an 18-year-old shooter killed 19 students and two teachers — many administrators, teachers and law enforcement responders initially assumed it was like the 47 other lockdowns that happened , a newly-released report by the Texas House of Representatives outlining the most grievous failures during the shooting response concluded.
Those lockdowns had fostered a culture of complacency at the school, it said. And almost all — 90% — of the previous security alerts earlier in the year came from “bailout” situations, described as when vehicles smuggling migrants lead officers on high-speed chases that often end by crashing the vehicle and allowing the occupants to scatter, the report says.
Texas police and city leaders say that the school lockdowns are necessary during bailouts due to their dangerous nature. But some experts say aggressive border control tactics contribute to hazardous pursuits, and little substantive evidence suggests the general public is at risk from the migrants themselves.
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‘Going to have complacency set in’
Data on bailouts is sparse, but more than half of U.S. Customs and Border Control encounters with migrants this fiscal year occurred in Texas, according to CBP data.
School lockdowns in response to the bailouts are common practice throughout Texas but happen more often in border communities, said Jimmy Perdue, president of the Texas Police Chiefs Association and the North Richland Hills Police chief.
“It’s good law enforcement practice that if you have a bailout situation near a school, you’re going to lock down the school for safety and security reasons,” Perdue told USA TODAY. “And if you do that, if you’re in an area where this occurs on a regular frequent basis, then you’re going to have complacency set in.”
The bailout alarms sounded so frequently at Robb Elementary that when Uvalde Police Sgt. Daniel Coronado walked into the school during the May 24 shooting and didn’t immediately see injured students in the hallway, he testified that he believed it was probably a bailout situation.
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The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, who has been criticized for failing to assume command during the chaotic police response to the shooting, also testified in the report that the possibility of a bailout “came over my mind at some point.” He said that the alerts were necessary because passengers would scatter everywhere, and school district police did not want them coming on campus.
The frequency of “less-serious bailout-related alerts” in the town, the report says, “diluted the significance of alerts and dampened everyone’s readiness to act on alerts.”
Sunday’s report adds that there have been examples of high-speed driving that sometimes crossed school parking lots as well as reports of bailout incidents involving firearms in neighborhoods surrounding the school.
But there have been zero incidents of bailout-related violence on Uvalde public school grounds. Some experts say provocation of the high-speed chases by police heightens the risk for border communities.
“Border Patrol doggedly pursues these undocumented people in a way that can often be life-threatening, even though the people aboard that vehicle have not committed more than just the administrative crime of being in the United States undocumented,” said Adam Isacson, who directs the Washington Office on Latin America’s Defense Oversight program.
‘Police best practice is not to engage in a high-speed chase near a school’
Police often have other options to apprehend smugglers besides high-speed chases through communities, said Vicki Gaubeca, director for the Southern Border Communities Coalition.
“A police best practice is not to engage in a high-speed chase near a school or any other area that puts the life of the public at risk,” Gaubeca said.
Gaubeca attributed the aggressive police response to increasingly stringent border policies, particularly in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has deployed thousands of Department of Public Safety officers and Texas National Guard troops to the Southern border to arrest and detain migrants crossing illegally from Mexico, bolstering federal immigration enforcement — a program critics say is unconstitutional.
“Gov. Abbott is the one who’s contributing to this problem by creating a narrative that isn’t reality on the ground,” Gaubeca said. “The reality on the ground is the place is oversaturated with law enforcement. The borders have been hyper-militarized.”
Uvalde’s mayor, Don McLaughlin, spoke at a July 5 news conference with Texas county officials where they announced emergency declarations about safety on the border. Many officials described the increased flow of migrants across the border as “the invasion.”
McLaughlin said bailouts endangered students. He claimed immigrants who come through Uvalde have been “pedophiles, convicted murderers, drug dealers,” and “gang members.”
But Shaw Drake, the staff attorney and policy counsel for border and immigrants’ rights at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said it’s the high-speed chase that’s dangerous.
Drake tracks the number of deaths resulting from border patrol vehicle pursuits and said between 2019 and 2021, the number of deaths increased 11-fold, to 23 deaths last year. This year is on track to become the deadliest on record, he added.
“Pursuing vehicles in such a dangerous fashion does present dangers for the general public,” Drake told USA TODAY. “But it presents that from the results of the dangerous law enforcement activity of chasing vehicles, not at all anything that any individual has done after bailing out of a vehicle.”
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