Butterfly Sanctuary Boss Caught in Border Crisis Chases Away Texas Cops
Source: Rolling Stone
Butterfly Sanctuary Boss Caught in Border Crisis Chases Away Texas Cops
Marianna Wright says that state law enforcement has encroached on the nature preserve under the guise of working with U.S. Border Control
BY MILES KLEE
MAY 26, 2023
THE NATIONAL BUTTERFLY Center — a nature preserve in Mission, Texas, just north of the Rio Grande — has been threatened for years by the potential construction of a border wall and even far-right QAnon extremists who falsely claim it’s a hub for human trafficking. In that time, the sanctuary’s director, Marianna Wright, has developed a tough stance against those who try to intimidate or harass her staff.
Now Wright has gone viral again, this time for challenging Texas Department of Public Safety troopers who entered the property along with U.S. Border Patrol agents on Thursday, supposedly because migrants were reported crossing in the area. “They are told that as long as they are ‘assisting Border Patrol’ the 4th Amendment doesn’t apply,” the center tweeted, noting that this is not true. (While the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, federal border authorities enjoy an exception to the law and generally don’t require warrants or probable cause within their areas of operation. State law enforcement does not have the same powers.)
Link to tweet
Wright tells Rolling Stone that Thursday morning, the center’s grounds manager alerted her that officers were “swarming” the property. She grabbed her phone to start recording them. The officers claimed they were looking for migrants. Agents subjected two middle-aged Latino men working at the center to inspection by canine. A Border Patrol helicopter circled low overhead.
“It’s always bullshit,” Wright says of the USBP’s reasons for showing up at the center. “So they’re like, ‘Oh, a group just crossed.’ And we’re like, ‘Really? It’s 11 a.m. We’ve been open for three hours, we’ve encountered no one. Why are you just here now?'” But, Wright says, while some of her co-workers assumed the entire group was with Border Patrol, she realized that a few of the men had Texas DPS patches — while still “wearing camo and tactical greens, so that the average citizen” would assume they were USBP agents.
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Read more: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/butterfly-sanctuary-texas-border-trespassing-cops-1234743122/
Non-paywalled link: https://news.yahoo.com/butterfly-sanctuary-boss-caught-border-233023287.html
Link to tweet
