It’s early April in Uvalde. That means professional barbecue chefs and hobbyist grillers make their way to the Uvalde County Fairplex, preparing ribs, brisket and barbacoa for their overnight smoke ahead of an annual weekend cookoff.
This event is special to the roughly 12 competitors in attendance from across the 830 area code. It’s part of an annual scholarship fundraiser in memory of Makenna Elrod Seiler. A gunman killed the 10-year-old student and 20 others at Robb Elementary School three years ago.
Registered nurse Sarah Reyes sits out under a canopy as her husband Mike mans the grills. The couple lives a mile from the border in Del Rio, but they travel the area entering plates from their Whatcha Smokin’ food truck in local competitions like these.
Cookoff travel brings Reyes, 50, and her husband into town frequently. But they make a point never to miss the Makenna Elrod Seiler Memorial Scholarship Event. Reyes remembers the shooting, its aftermath and the palpable sense of shock it brought to the small city of about 15,000 people.
“Everybody was on edge,” Reyes said. “You walked into a convenience store and everybody looked at you like, 'who's coming in? Who's going out?’ It was just a really, really sad situation. So, this is an important event for us to continue to do in her memory.”
Among the often-reported but seldom-explored facts of the tragedy is one key finding of a special Texas House committee’s investigation into the shooting: “bailouts” occurred so frequently in law enforcement pursuits near Robb at the time teachers and administrators became desensitized to the resulting schoolwide “Raptor” emergency alerts, lawmakers found.
These alerts didn't specify what each emergency was. A former Robb administrator estimated bailouts prompted about 90% of lockdown or secure alerts in the first half of 2022.
The colloquial term “bailout” describes the practice of high-speed pursuit suspects stopping or crashing the vehicle, then “bailing out" of the car and running.
The lead-up to the shooting did involve a crash — the shooter crashed into a ditch while driving toward Robb — but he wasn’t being pursued. Two men called 911 after they walked toward his truck and he started shooting.
In the two years leading up to the shooting, 57 vehicle pursuits in Uvalde County alone ended in what could be categorized as a bailout: either suspects escaped on foot or fled on foot before they were apprehended, according to Texas Department of Public Safety data, which includes some but not all chases started by local and federal agencies.
“It got to the point where when you heard sirens, you didn't even wait to see if it was ambulance, police, fire,” Reyes said. “You pulled over because more than likely it was going to be a chase."
These often involve immigrants crossing the border, law enforcement officials told KERA News in interviews last month. Immigration researchers say the spike was likely due to record-high migrant encounters with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and federal policies under former President Joe Biden.
But high-speed chases aren’t as much of an issue anymore. They’ve been on the decline in border counties for the past two years, DPS records show.
Experts say policies meant to slow the flow of immigration through the southern border — also under Biden — aided that.
What the Texas House made clear is the Robb Elementary shooting and its disastrous law enforcement response were inextricably tied to the region’s police pursuit problem. Saturday’s anniversary is a bleak reminder of that, and those dealing with the emotional damage don’t want to see those pursuit numbers go up again.
"I think people went (from) being in their homes and so confined with COVID, and then to this, not feeling safe, and then to the shooting and just so many things at once that I think it's affected a lot of people,” Reyes said. “It was just traumatic.”
The high-speed chase landscape at the border
Uvalde Police Chief Homer Delgado can attest to the confusion that spread after the first calls about the shooting. He was police chief in Dilley at the time — about an hour southeast of Uvalde — and he, too, thought it was a bailout.
“I think the fact that that was a norm at the time, that so many pursuits and bailouts were occurring, we didn't question it,” he said. “We said, 'OK, that's what it is.’”
Three major highways intersect in Uvalde, making the region a hotspot for pursuits around the time Delgado joined the department in 2023 as assistant chief: Highway 90 running from San Antonio to Del Rio, Highway 55 starting just north of Uvalde and extending south of Sonora, Texas, and Route 83, which carves a line north through the U.S. from the Mexico border to Canada. That doesn't include a web of backroads where people also travel from the border.
When Delgado became the Uvalde chief in 2024, he inherited a department under intense scrutiny over the Robb shooting while having to manage these frequent pursuits — about two a day, he said.
The fleeing drivers were most often suspected of smuggling people without legal status into the country, Delgado said, but DPS data obtained by KERA News doesn't specify which vehicle pursuits were related to human smuggling offenses.
Smuggling organizations often recruit teens and young adults — frequently U.S. citizens — for this work, with the task of transporting migrants advertised on social media as quick money. The myriad drivers Delgado said he’s pulled over are even more diverse — a Houston nurse, or a mother taking her 8-year-old daughter for the smuggling ride.
“A lot of times they're targeting people who are leaving entertainment venues on the border and asking them, 'hey, do you want to make some extra money? Will you take these people to San Antonio or Houston or wherever you're going?’” Delgado said. “That money's hard to turn down, especially with our economy the way it is, and you can make a fast three-to-five thousand dollars by transporting four people. You're driving home anyway.”
It’s become a multi-billion-dollar business with ties to organized groups like the Gulf Cartel. Instead of leading law enforcement on a pursuit, drivers and passengers can just bail out and abandon their cars — which are often stolen, said Del Rio Police Chief Frank Ramirez.
“That car is going towards a house or going towards another car,” Ramirez said. “Our responsibility is to get that car, block that car from hurting anybody. So, it takes all our attention away from who's running.”
Businesses and property are also at risk. Del Rio resident Caleb Hill's ranching and hunting work often takes him half an hour east to Brackettville.
Police chases became a daily event, he said. Drivers would plow through the fence and gate at the ranch where he works. Along with the bailouts came break-ins and theft, which Hill said put visiting hunters on edge and cost everyone money for repairs.
For three years, Hill said he and his family were afraid — not because the migrants were migrants, but because they were strangers.
“When they get up here, they've already made it so far in, they're either desperate or they're brazen,” Hill said. “They know that all the law enforcement is tied up on the river. No one's coming to help you. And that was the case, no one came to help.”
Still, enlisting a coyote and making the trek across the border is far from risk-free.
At least 1,107 people drowned crossing the Rio Grande between 2017 and 2023.
Fifty-three migrants were found dead in a trailer in San Antonio in the largest mass casualty event of its kind in Texas history.
And the ACLU of Texas found as of January, at least 115 people have died in Border Patrol-involved vehicle pursuits since 2010.
"With increased restriction and restricted entry at ports of entry, history shown us that migrants — migrant crossers or asylum seekers — will take greater risk to get into the country,” said University of California, Davis political science professor Brad Jones. “And taking the greater risks means being forced across the Rio Grande outside of a normal port of entry.”
Jones differentiates between a migrant crosser — someone who doesn’t want to get caught — and an asylum seeker, who wants to be apprehended because that’s how the asylum process begins.
Deadly Border Patrol pursuits are why the ACLU and other immigrant rights groups called for sweeping changes to CBP’s former 2021 pursuit policy and how the department generally handles chases. Critics said it granted Border Patrol officers too much discretion to chase vehicles without seriously weighing the potential risk to human life — not just locals and bystanders, but the immigrants' lives as well.
CBP revised its pursuit policy in 2023 with more explicit restrictions on chases, with preserving human life an emphasized priority. Border Patrol vehicle pursuit numbers began to come down in 2024, though it’s unclear whether the new policy played a role.
But CBP Acting Commissioner Pete Flores rescinded that directive in January, temporarily leaving in place the 2021 policy while CBP leaders suggest revisions. It remains to be seen how this move under the Trump administration — and continued funding for de facto immigration enforcement under Operation Lone Star — will impact the 830 area and other border communities.
Local law enforcement like Chief Delgado in Uvalde are still making these real-time human rights considerations, even while pursuits are down.
"I've seen it more times than I would like to remember — a simple pursuit where the driver decides they're going to do everything they can to get away, and with no regard to the people that are in the vehicle with them,” Delgado said. "I've seen people lose their lives and the driver walk away without a scratch. So yeah, that factors into everything that we do and how we prepare and how we handle each situation.”
Events like the April cookoff in memory of Seiler remind Delgado Uvalde is still healing, and his policing shouldn’t re-traumatize residents — even if it’s keeping them safe.
When pursuits were more frequent, his officers used spike sticks and even hoped drivers would bail out in more remote areas — anything to keep them away from the residential parts of Uvalde. If a chase does reach town, officers must now turn off their lights and sirens, drive the speed limit and not start chasing until the driver leaves the city.
"Any little thing that we can do to help our community get better,” Delgado said. “If that means making sure that we don't have any lights and sirens and things flying through town, which no town wants, but especially ours — we try to do our best to keep it out of town.”
Got a tip? Email Toluwani Osibamowo at tosibamowo@kera.org. You can follow Toluwani on X @tosibamowo.
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