How at least 50,000 illegal immigrants have changed once-rural East Texas hinterlands for the worse
But what no media has yet reported is that this horrific crime happened in what is regarded as America’s largest settlement of illegal immigrants, one literally exploding in population amid a U.S.-government fomented mass migration border crisis. In Liberty County, and now spreading into neighboring San Jacinto County where the massacre occurred, old-timers have been fleeing a new diversity of violent crime, murder, all-night weapons firing, and cartel drug trafficking that has boomed alongside the population. Indifferent U.S. immigration enforcement agencies leave this area to itself.
“The originals” of Liberty County, Texas — the self-descriptor of lifelong Anglo residents like Jimmy Rollins, who trace their lineage to early settler families — have mostly fled what they regard as ruinous, irredeemable change.
In June 2022, a Liberty County dog brought home a human hand, which led to the discovery of a badly decomposed body of a man who had been buried with his gun. Police couldn’t identify the corpse and were left to post photos of the clothing in hopes someone would recognize them.
In September 2022, passersby in Colony Ridge found the body of a 16-year-old Honduran girl who’d been shot to death and dumped in a ditch by the side of a road, still wearing her uniform from her work bussing tables at a local restaurant. Gang unit police arrested three foreign nationals, all under 21, and charged them with the murder of Emily Rodriguez-Avila, citing “gang overtones” as a motive. The family shipped her body back to Honduras for burial.
Evidence of cartel involvement dates to the earliest days of the illegal-alien settlement boom. To at least 2013, when federal, state, and local investigators raided a Mexican drug cartel’s marijuana grow operation on 300 acres in Liberty County, finding explosives, 6,000 marijuana plants, worker bunk houses, and guard towers. Local police at the time called it the “largest and most sophisticated marijuana-growing operation” in the county’s history.
In July 2021, the DEA broke that dubious record with the new biggest drug bust in Liberty County history with a raid that broke up a multimillion-dollar methamphetamine manufacturing lab operating inside one of the Colony Ridge dwellings.
“The amount of gunfire that is out there would blow your mind. I have a video you can listen to on New Year’s Eve. It sounded like Falluja,” Walker recounted, moving on to, “The loud Mexican music they play from Thursday night to Sunday. They all put their music on the same f***ing station and turn it up. Our homes at one o’clock in the morning doing this …,” Walker said, using her hand to thump the table like a drum. “And that’s why the originals all left.”
