Specially trained agents with the CBP force’s Bortac SWAT team drove from the US-Mexico border to assist responding officers in Uvalde.
They arrived between noon and 12.10pm, nearly 40 minutes before the 18-year-old gunman was killed by law enforcement.
In that time period, nine different 911 calls went out from inside the school that students were trapped and being shot.
The group was baffled why local officers told them to temporarily wait, according to the newspaper, and unsure why the Uvalde PD’s own SWAT team was not already on the scene.
Bortac agents with ballistic shields were ultimately able to get inside the classroom where Ramos was hiding and fatally shoot him.
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Customs and Border Protection agents were among the first to respond to the mass shooting, in which at least nineteen children and two teachers were killed. That response speaks to the outsized role CBP has in small towns near the border, like Uvalde.
A CBP official told Texas Monthly that as emergency calls first came in, four agents with CBP’s Bortac SWAT team were investigating stash houses on the border to the west of Uvalde. The agents immediately responded, arriving at the school just before noon. Bortac (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) is CBP’s’s paramilitary force, an elite group of agents trained to exchange gunfire with cartels. Border Patrol agents not in the SWAT unit also rushed to the school, for more personal reasons: their own children were in the building.
But as the news came in, the heavy presence of CPB agents led some on social media to
loudly question why immigration officers were so prominent on the scene. (Some of the posts conflated CBP with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
The agents’ presence at the school was easily explicable: they are everywhere in Uvalde. CBP’s white and green SUVs are familiar sights around the town, which is fewer than eighty miles from northern Mexico, and thus well within the hundred-mile “border zone” where CBP operates. Like many Texas towns in this zone, Uvalde hosts a permanent CBP checkpoint, where agents stop and inspect vehicles going north along the highway. In a town of about 15,000, CBP is a major employer, offering about 150 unionized jobs with solid salaries and government benefits. Many residents have at least one family member or friend who works for the agency.
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Along the more than 1,200 miles of border between Mexico and Texas, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies respond to one another’s calls for backup and regularly conduct joint operations.
So it was not unusual that agents with Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to the desperate request for backup from the Uvalde Police Department on Tuesday. It was highly unusual, however, for ICE officers to be pulling children out of school windows, and for Border Patrol agents to play such a central role in response to a school shooter, firing the bullets that killed him.
The Uvalde police asked for tactical equipment when they called for backup, and members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, the agency’s version of a SWAT team, dropped what they were doing and went to the school, about a 40-minute drive from where they had been working on the southwest border.