Los Fresnos, Texas, is a small farming hamlet astride State Highway 100, the route to South Padre Island. It is famous for annoying speed traps at either end of the town, where the speed limit on State Highway 100 drops from 65 to 35. Right in the middle of Los Fresnos is a large restaurant/Mexican Bakery called Abby’s Bakery. The owners Leonardo and Nora Báez, started selling homemade pan dulce out of their van on the side of a road in Los Fresnos. They sold their pan dulce from their roadside spot for 18 years before opening a large modern restaurant/bakery.
Last week, ICE raided Abby’s and hauled off every employee for being in the country illegally. They also arrested the Báez’s for harboring illegal workers on their property. The Federales discovered the entire staff lived in a tiny back room stuffed with bunk beds. Yet the owners are not facing charges for tax fraud like the owner of the Charleroi, Pennsylvania, staffing firm busted last week for putting illegal Haitians to work in food processing plants. Stranger still, nobody in the small tight-knit hamlet noticed that illegal migrants were running their favorite Mexican Bakery.
Man on the street interviews by a local TV station revealed local citizens greeted the news with shock and dismay. The citizens who could speak English were not concerned over the exploitation of Mexican workers; they were pissed that the Federales (a.k.a. ICE) were active in their town. I’m not sure what the Spanish speakers were saying but it was probably similar to the pull quote below:
“I’ve come to this bakery since I could drive just to find out that in your local community right around the corner they’re picking up people,” Los Fresnos resident Gordy Aguilar said.”
Do the citizens of Los Fresnos expect their service industry to be staffed by underpaid illegals? Are they not concerned about the social contract being violated by business owners dodging their payroll taxes? One would think the municipal authorities, who are just down the street next to the town rodeo grounds, would frown on this sort of thing, but they make a killing with the speed traps and may not really care.
At this point, the perceptive reader may wonder how a guy selling pan dulce from his van saves enough to open a bakery or restaurant. This raises questions about what kind of credit score a guy selling pan dulce on the side of the road could have. Or how does one raise the collateral to finance a bakery or restaurant from food truck sales? These are not the proper questions; there are hundreds of brand-new Mexican Bakeries just like Abby’s in the Rio Grande Valley, most owned by dudes who started out with a food truck. It’s an economic miracle that polite people ignore because we do not question miracles in the RGV.
Miracles happen constantly on the border, as they do in Mexico. For instance, Bird Flu spared Mexico, so I can buy a dozen eggs for less than a dollar just five miles from my house. If you Google bird flu Mexico you’ll see hundreds of articles from the WHO and legacy media organs claiming Mexico is in the middle of a bird flu epidemic. But they are not killing their chickens, which is keeping their egg prices down. Who are you going to believe? Your own lying eyes or the media?
We also have a powerful shrine to miracles in the RGV that was imported by the freakishly tall, dour Belgian monks of The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. They commissioned a copy from a talented Guadalajara artist of the Virgin Mary statue venerated at San Juan de los Lagos. They installed it in the Basilica of the National Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle. San Juan is next to Pharr, three exits after McAllen on the I-2 Expressway. Now the faithful can visit the shrine to seek miracles for themselves and return home with gallons of holy water, which is provided free of charge at the shrine. Holy water is the one thing nobody has on hand when they need it, so the wise supplicant stores a gallon or two for emergencies.
On October 23, 1970, a local flight instructor crashed his single-engine plane onto the roof of the Basilica during Friday Mass. The fifty priests inside the Basilica evacuated in good order, taking all the children from the attached school with them to safety. The only fatality was the pilot, but the Basilica was destroyed in the ensuing flames. Yet the statue of Our Lady of Saint John of the Valle emerged from the wreckage untouched by the flames. That was a true miracle that may have been facilitated by a priest taking the statue with him when they evacuated, but that’s not the point. The faithful do not quibble over annoying details when it comes to miracles.
The RGV was ready when the next round of miracles arrived in the form of NAFTA and Federal Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) grants. NAFTA created thousands of well-paying managerial jobs for Americans commuting to Mexican maquiladoras (manufacturing plants) or working for RGV-based logistic and trucking companies. That brought good money into the Valley but the motherlode was in the HSI grants.
The United States Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Housing and Urban Development have HSI grant programs. The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture also have HSI grant programs. The National Aeronautics & Space Administration, Department of Defense, National Endowment for the Humanities, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Transportation also have HSI grant programs. The amount of federal tax dollars that has poured into the RGV through HSI grants is impossible to estimate but easy to see in the form of brand-new schools, hospitals, municipal buildings, and everything local property taxes would cover if you lived in a Gringo community.
As federal tax dollars poured in to build infrastructure, local banks and credit unions financed an explosion of housing developments, apartment buildings, strip malls and automated car washes. The valley banks were founded partly to protect the cash of wealthy Mexicans who craved the dollar’s stability. Mexican capital continues to pour into these institutions, and Mexican investors are also happy to invest in American businesses and real estate. In the past, separating Narco money from legitimate investment pesos was almost impossible given the sophistication of Cartel money laundering schemes. But suddenly the ground has shifted.
Will the Trump administration continue to send Billions of tax dollars to the RGV via the Hydra-headed HSI system? I doubt it. Will unlimited amounts of Mexican investment money continue to flow into the valley? Not if the feds introduce DOGE-style, AI-assisted audits of local banks, hospitals, and construction companies. That level of scrutiny would turn up abnormalities indicating the involvement of cartel money. Our local cartel, the Cártel del Golfo (CDG, Gulf Cartel), has been active in the RGV since prohibition. They have invested billions with the aid of friendly RGV bankers, politicians, and law enforcement, despite the occasional arrest and prosecution of local bigwigs by the federal authorities.
But the amount of Cocaine seized by multiple agencies in the past week in the RGV indicates a new game is afoot. A McAllen woman was busted with 48 pounds of cocaine stuffed in her quarter panels at the Progresso Port of Entry on Monday. An illegal from Mexico living in Mission was found with 26 pounds of coke during a traffic stop the next day and a Brownsville senior citizen tried to get over the Los Indios bridge Mule style with 600k worth of white gold in his old truck. On Wednesday, the Border Patrol found 563 pounds of cocaine at the Sarita checkpoint in Kingsville. The next day a tour bus carrying a mariachi band across the Anzalduas Bridge to their gig in Houston was found to contain 200 pounds of cocaine in a modified gas tank.
This dramatic leap in drug seizures could easily be the result of the increased use of military ISR platforms over Mexico. Ten years ago, I saw how cutting-edge technology could harvest specific targeting information from thin air. That technology has improved significantly and I doubt many people understand the depth of current capabilities. On the other hand, it could be Narcos diming out other Narcos to maneuver for advantage under changing circumstances.
To top off an extraordinary week, President Claudia Sheinbaum pulled off a Narco Mega Extradition, handing over 29 senior leaders from every major Cartel in Mexico to the Department of Justice. Included was Rafel Caro Quintero who will be tried for the 1985 murder of DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. Quintero is facing the death penalty, and before this week, Mexico had refused to extradite any Mexican for prosecution if they faced the death penalty. We are now firmly in uncharted territory.
President Trump won every county in the RGV, but the political and business elite in the Valley are die-hard Democrats. They have not worked through the seven stages of grief over their political irrelevance on the national stage. The local elites thrived on HSI grant money and narco bucks for decades retarding their ability to adapt to the challenges of an America-first future. Inshallah, the federales will come to the valley and start untangling the mess created by billions of narco bucks and poorly supervised (if not fraudulent) HSI grant monies. If they do, there is going to be hell to pay, and for once, the hard-working normies who elected President Trump will not be the ones footing the bill. And that, given what we have endured for the past eight years, would be a miracle.
