Texas probes 'inhumane' treatment of migrants at border

The Texas inspector general is investigating a state trooper's claims that superiors ordered officers at the Mexico border to push migrants, including small children and women with nursing babies, back into the Rio Grande and deny them water.

Nicholas Wingate, a trooper and medic for the Texas Department of Public Safety, or DPS, expressed concern over "inhumane" actions toward migrants in a July 3 email to supervisors, the Houston Chronicle reported on Tuesday.

In the email, Wingate called for several policy changes to prevent further injury to migrants, including removing barrels wrapped in razor wire in the river.

"The wire and barrels in the river need to be taken out as this is nothing but an inhumane trap in high water and low visibility," Wingate wrote.

He also told officials to reverse orders to withhold water from migrants.

"Due to the extreme heat, the order needs to be immediately reversed as well," Wingate wrote, as quoted by the Chronicle. "I believe we have stepped over a line into the inhumane."

The trooper also said razor wire deployed by troopers has injured people, including a woman who had a miscarriage while entangled in the wire.

Travis Considine, a DPS spokesman, said in an email that the Office of the Inspector General, which investigates claims of misconduct by state employees, "is investigating the allegations made in the email in question".

"There is not a directive or policy that instructs troopers to withhold water from migrants or push them back into the river," Considine said.

The Chronicle reported that Wingate sent the email to a sergeant on July 3, detailing some of the things he witnessed while on patrol in Eagle Pass, where Governor Greg Abbott recently ordered the deployment of a floating barrier in the Rio Grande to deter migrant crossings.

The trooper said in the email that he was out on patrol around 10 pm on June 25 when he and other troopers came across a group of about 120 people, including small children and nursing babies, who were "exhausted, hungry and tired" along a fence line on the US side.

"We called the shift officer in command, and we were given orders to push the people back into the water to go to Mexico. We decided that this was not the correct thing to do," Wingate said. "With the very real potential of exhausted people drowning, we made contact with command again and expressed our concerns and we were given the order to tell them to go to Mexico."

Meanwhile, New York's mayor said the city has no more room for migrants, and that authorities will hand out flyers at the US border with Mexico encouraging them to go elsewhere.

More than 90,000 migrants, mainly from Central and South America, have arrived in the Big Apple since April last year, stretching services to breaking point.