Greg Abbott’s new billboard campaign warns migrants

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that Texas is putting up dozens of billboards in Mexico and Central American countries warning migrants of the dangers of trying to come to the U.S., Gov. Greg Abbott said Thursday. The billboards will offer bleak messages in multiple languages. “Many girls who try to migrate to Texas are kidnapped,” one will say. “Your wife and daughter will pay for their trip with their bodies,” will read another. A third will ask, “How much did you pay to have your daughter raped?” “This is tough medicine,” Abbott told reporters in Eagle Pass, describing the roughly $100,000 marketing campaign as an attempt to push back on messaging by cartels and smugglers. He did not say where the money for the ads was coming from.

“We are trying to provide a push back against that narrative and provide reality — facts — for immigrants thinking about coming here to save their lives, to save them from sexual assault — save them from being arrested, and let them know there are consequences if they take any further steps to come to the state of Texas,” Abbott said. The governor rolled out the campaign on a border ranch where the owners say they have found migrant women beaten and “left to die.” “It makes you terrified to go outside of your own house and enjoy your own property,” Kimberly Wall said. Sexual assault of migrants has been documented for years, though there is limited data on its prevalence. The New York Times in 2019 found more than 100 documented reports of sexual assault of undocumented women along the border in the past two decades, a number the paper reported is probably far from a complete accounting. Reuters reported last year that criminal investigations of rape in the Mexican border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros were the highest on record, as more migrants were waiting there for legal entry into the country to claim asylum.