The pro-gun, pro-life border sheriff who lost the loyalty of his neighbors after being painted as ‘soft’ on immigration

In 2008, Joe Frank Martinez beat a Republican incumbent to become the first Latino elected sheriff along this 110-mile stretch of border. Nearly 16 years later, in mid-September, Martinez stood in front of several dozen voters at the San Felipe Lions Club, having to campaign harder than ever before, and on an issue that wasn’t a factor in his previous elections: immigration.

The 68-year-old Democrat had been in law enforcement for nearly five decades, and save for a little more than a year when he was stationed elsewhere as a state trooper, Martinez told the audience, he’d spent them ensuring the safety of residents in Val Verde County. He had mastered politics in this place nearly three hours west of San Antonio, where residents prided themselves on voting for the person they liked best instead of a party. He’d handily won each of his elections and ran unopposed four years ago when the county tipped for Donald Trump.

Since then, it had been a tumultuous time, Martinez acknowledged to those assembled in the cafeteria-like space. They’d gone through a pandemic. They’d contended with a winter storm that had left hundreds of Texans dead. And then, he said, “We faced the Haitians.”

He didn’t explain what he meant, and he didn’t have to. The memory of nearly 20,000 primarily Haitian immigrants — the equivalent of more than half of the population in Del Rio — arriving at the border almost all at once and held under the international bridge for two weeks in September 2021 has been seared into the minds of residents here. Many feared it could happen again and questioned whether Martinez was tough enough on immigration.

Immigration is not part of Martinez’s job. But in Del Rio, like in other majority Latino border communities across the country, the issue is high on voters’ minds and is disrupting long-standing political allegiances. The barrel-chested lawman with a booming voice has experienced those disruptions firsthand. In a community where about 80% of residents are Latino, some had begun painting the Democratic sheriff as soft on immigration and falsely accused him of aiding unauthorized crossings.

Sometimes the attacks happened openly. When he pulled immigrants who had arrived at the banks of the river out of the water to keep them from drowning, Republicans accused him of helping people enter the country illegally. Some residents, including supporters, criticized Martinez on social media when they learned he would be endorsed by the Bexar County sheriff based in San Antonio who, during a speech at the Democratic National Convention, called Trump self-serving and accused the former president of making border sheriffs’ jobs harder when he killed a bipartisan border security deal earlier this year.

Other times, some of those who turned against Martinez did so without saying a word. A sign he placed at a longtime friend’s house had been replaced by one with his opponent’s slogan about “bringing order to the border.”

Standing in front of the crowd gathered at the Lions Club, Martinez shared a dizzying array of charts he’d brought along to respond to his critics. Things were in order at the border. Val Verde was seeing some of the lowest numbers of immigrants crossing in years, even lower than in neighboring counties where sheriffs had gone as far as to allow militias to operate.

As for whether the Haitian migrant episode could happen again — the question he knew was looming in people’s minds — he reminded them that it was federal authorities, not his office, who controlled border crossings.

He was as upset as they were with President Joe Biden’s response, and he’d been very public about saying as much. He hoped that when it came to the race for sheriff, they would judge him on how he’d handled the responsibilities assigned to him. How he’d served Val Verde, like his father before him, as a lawman, neighbor, husband and father; that who he was outweighed his affiliation with any party.

This time, however, he wasn’t sure the pitch would work.

“I want to try to keep my campaign at the local level,” Martinez said in an interview.

“I might be blind to the fact that it can’t be done.”

Shifting politics

It’s long been understood that the Latino vote is neither monolithic nor reliably Democratic. Places such as Del Rio, a deeply Catholic border city whose economy depends heavily on law enforcement jobs, have always held conservative views. Republicans like former President George W. Bush won here by appealing to those views while arguing for a compassionate approach to immigration.

Until recently, the party’s far-right shift on immigration hadn’t managed to make significant inroads in border communities. Conservative assertions about the issue, particularly those that painted immigration as an “invasion,” had failed to resonate with people on the border precisely because they knew better from living there. To them, the border was a fundamental feature of their day-to-day lives and an engine of their economies, not something to be afraid of. A decade ago, the overwhelming majority of immigrants who crossed the border were from Mexico. And the majority of the Latinos living on the United States side of the border had roots in Mexico as well.

That’s changed, as have other immigration patterns at the border, and so have the attitudes of those who live here. Democratic politics have been slow to keep up — at least rhetorically — with those shifts. But Republicans have seized on them to move more voters into their camp. The state’s Republican Party no longer attempts to strike a balance on immigration. In fact, during this presidential cycle, it has gone even further by using the issue as a litmus test for whether it can turn border communities red, not just in their choices for state and federal candidates but for local ones too.

Beginning in 2014, the numbers of Central American families and unaccompanied minors arriving at the border started to increase. The sight of juveniles held in makeshift camps on area military bases stirred political tensions in border communities and beyond. Later, the border became ground zero for Trump’s anti-immigration efforts, which involved separating children from their parents and forcing Central American asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico until they were given a date to appear in U.S. immigration court. Neither of those efforts had a lasting impact on the number of people arriving at the border, but they forced more immigrants to be stuck on the Mexican side for longer periods of time — and disruptions on the Mexican side of the border almost always ripple into the U.S. side.

In an unprecedented effort to help the United States keep immigrants from arriving at the border, Mexico began detaining them and transporting them farther south. It also allowed the United States to turn back Mexican nationals and some Central Americans, but not most other immigrants. When word got out among would-be immigrants in South America, West Africa, China and Haiti, they began arriving in such large numbers that they overwhelmed the border, along with several of the U.S. towns and cities where they ultimately landed.

The thousands of Haitians who arrived in Del Rio three years ago shook the city because it was like nothing people there had experienced in recent history. And like Martinez, a lot of residents here have histories that go back a long way.

His grandparents migrated from Italy and Mexico more than 100 years ago, attracted by the area’s fertile land and ranches. One grandmother fled instability and violence leading up to the Mexican Revolution. Growing up, Martinez recalls immigrants knocking on the door of his family’s home, asking for a meal and temporary work. Sometimes that meant a little less food on the table or that the shed in the backyard got yet another fresh coat of paint it didn’t really need.

Martinez and his nine siblings learned to move easily in two cultures.

“My dad always emphasized to us: We’re in this country, we’re Americans first,” said his brother Leonel Martinez Jr., 67, who runs a binational company that makes leather horse saddles in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, and sells them in the United States. “He also stressed that we should never forget our roots.”

A staunch Catholic and Democrat, the family patriarch looms large in the choices the siblings make. He was active in fighting for equal rights at a time when Mexican Americans were excluded from many activities and did not have a voice in government. He co-founded a civic group to help bring sewer lines, paved roads and mailboxes to his predominantly Mexican American neighborhood; helped elect the city’s first Mexican American mayor; and dreamed of becoming the first elected Hispanic sheriff for Del Rio — a dream he held on to until his death at the age of 51.

Because of him, the brothers are Democrats too, but in varying ways.

Leonel, who wears a goatee and goes by Leo, voted for Barack Obama and then voted twice for Trump, saying he aligns more closely with the latter on the economy and immigration. He believes U.S. policy has become such that it is easier for people from far-off countries to come and stay than it is for Mexicans.

“Why would you do that?” he said. “I mean, if I see my neighbor having a problem, he’s the first one I think I want to help. If I see somebody on the other side of the world that needs help, I don’t know.”

Another brother, David, was elected four years ago as Val Verde county attorney. The 60-year-old with graying hair is among the more progressive of his siblings. He opposed efforts to prosecute some people seeking asylum and said that as far as he’s concerned, what’s been going on at the border is not an immigration crisis. It’s “a human crisis.” And in responding to it, he said while choking back tears, “We can’t be inhuman. We can’t put our compassion aside.”

Joe Frank, whose given name is Jose Francisco, straddles his brothers’ views. He’s pro-gun, is anti-abortion and has a son who works as a Border Patrol agent. He believes that there should be a path for people to make their case for starting new lives in the United States but that the current system is too chaotic and doesn’t move fast enough to remove those who don’t qualify.

That position had always worked for him among voters because that’s where they seemed to be too — until the Haitian immigrants arrived.

Unfolding crisis

On a chilly morning in January 2021, Martinez stood at the edge of the riverbank as a rescue boat brought in the body of a 33-year-old Haitian woman. She wore red tennis shoes and blue and white basketball shorts. Her shirt was pushed above her bulging belly. The woman, who drowned while trying to reach Del Rio, had carried twin babies nearly to term.

Martinez was shaken by the loss of three lives all at once. He felt people either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on at the border.

He began capturing photos on his phone of the crisis he saw unfolding before him: parents with their babies struggling to wade through the Rio Grande and other immigrants who were not lucky enough to survive the river’s currents. There were also the images of a human smuggler who was arrested three times after she kept getting released, young girls traveling alone and a high-speed chase that left eight immigrants dead.

In the months that followed, Border Patrol encounters in the Del Rio sector, which stretches 245 miles along the Rio Grande through Val Verde and two other border counties, doubled from 11,000 that January to nearly 22,000 in April 2021. Frustrated, Martinez wrote his first-ever opinion piece, for USA Today. In it, he called on Washington politicians to visit his county rather than just pass through for a photo opportunity, and he pleaded with them to put their egos aside and pass comprehensive immigration reform.

“If they could stay a few days and see the madness and mayhem going on right now, there’d be no more wasting time trying to decide whether the border situation is a ‘crisis’ or not,” he wrote. “If they could have witnessed my deputies pull a full-term pregnant woman’s body out of the Rio Grande, maybe they could put their differences aside.”

It wasn’t just a humanitarian issue, Martinez explained in an interview on Fox News that month. It was a resource issue. “When I have four deputies working, and three of them are tied up for the majority part of the day, we can’t serve our citizens and our community the way we need to be serving them,” he told the cable news network.

No Washington decision-makers visited. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, however, seized the moment. A loyal Trump supporter and one of Biden’s fiercest critics, Abbott traveled to Del Rio that June to hold a border security summit. He praised Martinez, saying he appreciated “all that he and every man and woman involved in law enforcement are doing, especially to step up and help secure our border.”

The governor described what was happening as an invasion. He then announced that the state would build its own wall and arrest immigrants for trespassing as part of Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar state initiative he’d launched earlier that year. “We are going to do everything we can to secure the border,” Abbott said to a boisterous crowd, “and it begins immediately today right here in Val Verde County.”

But three months later, little had changed.

Immigrants started to arrive in Del Rio by the hundreds, then by the thousands. Instead of being processed and leaving the city almost as soon as they arrived, as they typically did, they waited with Border Patrol-issued color-coded raffle-like tickets for the opportunity to turn themselves over to federal authorities so they could request legal protections, including asylum.

They lay on pieces of cardboard under makeshift tents fashioned from river cane they’d cut from the banks of the Rio Grande. Parents and their children vomited and passed out from dehydration in the triple-digit heat. There were no showers, and only about one portable toilet was available for every 140 people.

Some Del Rio residents asked how they could help, while others called for the immediate deportation of all of the immigrants. One woman fired her revolver in the direction of a group of Haitians, claiming she had panicked.

The swift and sudden arrival of so many immigrants also tested the Martinez family.

When the federal government announced the temporary closure of the international bridge, Leo Martinez called the sheriff, hoping that his brother had information on how long the closure would last. Joe Frank Martinez didn’t know.

While he waited to learn more, Leo Martinez was forced to divert U.S. deliveries of saddles through another international bridge more than 50 miles away, where the driver had to wait upwards of 12 hours to cross. The closure cost the company several thousand dollars in fuel and additional staff time.

“We are pawns in this game that the federal government’s playing,” said Leo Martinez, a self-described ultra-super-conservative Democrat, later adding that much like in a game of chess, border residents are “the ones that you sacrifice up front.”

The Sunday after the bridge closed, David Martinez, the county’s top attorney, was packing for a conference when he got a call from a city official. Abbott wanted police to arrest thousands of immigrants under the bridge for trespassing, and the city official asked if he would prosecute them.

The county attorney didn’t directly say no, but his response left no doubt.

The federal government had created the circumstances that had caused the immigrants to remain there, he told the city official. It had brought in portable toilets and provided some food and water. For police to arrest them, officials needed to make it clear they were no longer allowed on city property. Besides, the county attorney said, the crushing workload on his three-person legal team would inevitably lead to a backlog that would force immigrants to stay in detention longer than is legal. Without proper notice, “I would have been violating people’s constitutional rights by the thousands, and I wasn’t willing to do it.”

Two days later, Abbott was back in Del Rio, where he accused Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris of “promoting and allowing open-border policies.” He touted the arrests of immigrants under his state initiative, one that counted work that had nothing to do with the border as part of its metrics for success.

The sheriff stood behind him.

Losing ground

While on his way to a doctor’s appointment last fall, Joe Frank Martinez got a call from an unknown number. It was a Republican operative inviting him to run on behalf of the other team.

The state’s Republican leaders, including its two U.S. senators, loved him, Martinez recalled the operative telling him. He’d taken positions as conservative as theirs on the issues they cared most about. If he agreed to switch parties, the political action committee would cover his filing fees and help fund his campaign.

He’d certainly had serious differences with Democrats in recent years. The party had changed in ways he didn’t like. But leaving felt too much like a dishonor, not only to his father’s memory, but to his ideals.

He said no.

Shortly afterward, the PAC, known as Project Red TX, placed its support behind a 56-year-old police officer named Rogelio Roger Hernandez. The Republican challenger was born in Del Rio but had spent his law enforcement career in San Antonio. Hernandez said he was planning to retire and move back to the border city to be near his mom. He couldn’t recall if Project Red TX approached him or if he approached the group.

Project Red TX began to more aggressively target border communities after Trump made gains in the traditionally Democratic strongholds during the 2020 presidential election. The group, which helps elect Republicans in local races in Latino communities, has raised more than $2.5 million. The bulk of that money comes from a political action committee whose biggest donors include Texas real estate businessmen Harlan Crow and Richard Weekley.

This year alone, the group has spent about $370,000 on advertising for about 50 local candidates, primarily in border counties, according to campaign finance reports. Three of the candidates, including Hernandez, are in Val Verde County.

The message seems to be resonating. This year, for the first time in decades, more people voted in the Val Verde County Republican primary than in the Democratic primary — in fact, twice as many did.

As part of his campaign to bring “order to the border,” Hernandez has promised to secure additional resources for the sheriff’s office.

“I’ll get them better training, better equipment, better vehicles, better everything,” Hernandez said, without offering specifics on how he would meet that promise, saying only “there’s grants out there that you can get.”

Martinez said his office has worked diligently to secure available grants, including those that are designated for border security. Altogether, Val Verde County and the city of Del Rio have received more than $13 million in state and federal grants since 2021, about half of which can be attributed to Operation Lone Star. That exceeds what they got in total the previous 13 years.

“That individual hasn’t lived here in over 30 years, and all of a sudden he shows up in the ninth inning. Come on, give me a break,” Martinez said.

As the race heated up this summer, Wayne Hamilton, a longtime Texas Republican operative who heads Project Red TX, posted a photo of himself and Hernandez on social media. Behind them was a stack of the candidate’s campaign signs. Hernandez was committed to border security, Hamilton wrote, then added, “The incumbent Sheriff was featured in a documentary helping migrants enter the country illegally. It’s time for change.”

Hamilton declined multiple interview requests and did not reply to questions about the race or about which documentary he was referring to. News footage from the 2021 immigration spike shows Martinez extending his hand to help people in the Rio Grande, who had already reached the U.S., safely onto land. He then turned those immigrants over to Border Patrol.

“Once you are in the United States, in the middle of that river, I’ve got to protect you,” Martinez said, questioning what people would have said if he hadn’t done so and one of the immigrants had drowned. “It’s a human being at the end of the day.”

The attacks are particularly upsetting for Martinez, who prides himself on having friends from the right and left. Among Martinez’s backers is the Republican sheriff he beat in 2008. “It’s about relationships, something I’ve been building since 1977,” he said.

Some of those relationships turned out to be more fragile than Martinez was aware.

On a recent afternoon in mid-September, Mary Fritz, a fourth-generation rancher and Trump supporter, picked up a sign for his opponent during a meet-and-greet at a local burger restaurant.

Fritz, a petite 62-year-old with weathered skin, and Martinez have been friends for about four decades. She has voted for him every time — even against Republicans.

He’s a good sheriff, Fritz says. She appreciates how he’s readily available and out in the community where constituents can talk to him and voice their concerns. “I just wish he would have pressed the border issue more,” Fritz said as she walked on a patch of the 2,000 acres of desert scrubland that abuts the Rio Grande where her family raises sheep and goats.

Martinez didn’t hold back his frustration. If voters were willing to disregard his decades of service and judge him on something he had no control over, “God bless them.”

Broken system

When politicians, government bureaucrats or reporters come to Del Rio and ask the sheriff to show them whether the billions of dollars spent by successive presidents have made the border more secure, he piles them into his white Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck and drives them down to the so-called wall so that they can see for themselves.

“All this right here,” Martinez says, pointing to an expanse of land where ranches once stood about a mile north of the Rio Grande, “used to be little ranchitos that went all the way to the river. I think the U.S. government made something like 13 millionaires when they purchased all this property.”

In their place, there is now a jumble of fencing.

The black wrought iron panels about 14 feet tall were erected during the administration of former President George W. Bush, who was trying to funnel immigrants into areas where Border Patrol could more easily catch them. Martinez thinks those worked.

The Trump administration tore down some of them to build sections twice as high of the “big, beautiful wall” he promised voters. But Trump left office before completing the project. Biden then came in and immediately paused construction, pledging to not build “another foot” of wall. In Del Rio, that meant that workers left stacks of construction materials behind and gaps between the panels of fencing wide enough for tractor-trailers to drive through them. The Biden administration attempted to close those gaps by hanging flimsy wire mesh that is already sagging in some areas from people climbing over it.