A county court-at-law judge found no probable cause on Monday to continue holding 140 illegal aliens at the El Paso County Jail. They were detained on state riot charges. 

 These people are some of the illegal aliens who stampeded over the Texas border creating a border riot, overwhelming National Guard troops on March 21. They tore down razor wire along the Rio Grande River and rushed the border fence at Marker No. 36 in the Riverside area of El Paso's Lower Valley. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) arrested them. Most of them were male and from Venezuela. 

On Easter Sunday, presiding Magistrate Judge Humberto Acosta ruled that hundreds of those arrested and detained could be released on their own recognizance during a bond hearing conducted by teleconference. The judge said that those with an immigration hold would remain in jail. Acosta justified his surprising action by claiming that since the El Paso District Attorney's Office was not ready to proceed with detention hearings for each alleged rioter, he had to let them go.

The next group of alleged rioters was released because a public defender said the arrest affidavits didn't say what each illegal alien did on April 12, nor name an officer or agent who saw them do it. She argued that the illegals followed the crowd and may not have been aware of what was happening at the front of the crowd.  

“It’s like someone at the front of a line at a concert gets in a fight with the bouncer and you arrest everyone that was in line,” El Paso County Chief Public Defender Kelli Childress said.

El Paso County Court-at-Law No. 7 Judge Ruben Morales said the arrest affidavits didn’t show probable cause that everyone named in the documents participated in the riot. He excluded from his ruling two individuals, one who was never arrested and one being held on a felony charge.

“The question is whether the affidavits provide the necessary probable cause to believe this individual named has committed the offense of rioting. Not whether there was a riot, and people were involved in that, or that he was in the group of (300-plus), but that this person took some specific action detailed in the affidavit,” the judge said in court.

Color me skeptical. It was a crowd of hundreds but the situation escalated into violence against law enforcement trying to protect the border so quickly, I would think that everyone knew there was a stampede to get across the Texas border. 

Judge Morales said he could give prosecutors and the defense time to present witnesses and additional documents later. The bar for his ruling on probable cause in the case to keep people in jail is lower. 

Jennifer Lynn Vandenbosch represented the state at the hearing. She said the illegal aliens weren't walking out of jail. The federal government has placed immigration detainers on all of them because they entered the United States illegally. They must stay at the county jail up to an additional 48 hours until the Border Patrol picks them up.

It is reported that Vandenbosch repeatedly complained in court that the state was notified of the Monday hearing on Sunday night. The state prosecutors, she said, did not have sufficient notice. 

 Kelli Childress, the El Paso County Chief Public Defender, said that the state wants to charge large numbers of migrants coming across the border. Yes. That's true and it should happen. Crossing the border illegally is, well, illegal. Stampeding the border and physically attacking law enforcement on the border is illegal. Why shouldn't they be charged, no matter the numbers? 

“To defend real charges is one thing, but what we have is mass arrests that don’t have probable cause. What we’re seeing is an effort to get the headline, to get it on the news that 142 migrants breeched the border, and they’re using inflammatory language that’s just not true,” she said. “With the very limited resources we are going to fight very hard those that are true injustices as opposed to that have real evidence of criminal action.”

The number of illegal aliens crossing the Texas border at El Paso slowed a bit but now it is returning to its previous high numbers. Illegal aliens feel emboldened to cross the border outside of legal ports of entry because they get away with it. They get detained and then released into the country, free to go wherever they choose to go. 

This entitled arrogance is morphing into aggressive violence against the Border Patrol agents and National Guard troops. This has to stop now.

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