On Saturday, September 26, a small Coast Guard boat was patrolling the Rio Grande near Garceno, Texas. Garceno is a speck of a town in Starr County, a few miles from Roma. The crew was running the river with Border Patrol agents.
Then someone on the Mexican bank started shooting at them.
The Coast Guardsmen fired back and, in the Coast Guard's words, suppressed the threat. Nobody on the American side was hurt. The boat came home without a mark on it.
So who was on the other end? Gov. Greg Abbott was careful and said cartel involvement "is what I've heard." Hector Garza, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council, was less careful: "I think we can confirm that it is a cartel."
Six days later, Chinook helicopters started setting U.S. Army soldiers down on islands in the middle of the Rio Grande.
About 500 soldiers came in from West Texas. They're working under Joint Task Force-Southern Border as part of Operation Ardent Vanguard. They're camped on the river itself, in the same stretch of water the gunfire came from, and they'll be there for roughly 30 days.
The State Department could have filed a diplomatic protest. Someone could have sent a firm letter to Mexico City. The Trump administration sent Chinooks.
These soldiers are stepping into the busiest smuggling corridor on the southern border. The Rio Grande Valley sector covers 320 river miles, 250 miles of coastline and 19 counties. Coast Guard Forces Rio Grande has been working it alongside Border Patrol, the Department of War and the Texas Military Department.
After the shooting, the Coast Guard said it "works closely with U.S. Border Patrol, the Department of War and the Texas Military Department to secure the border, disrupt illicit activity and protect the American people." It added that "threats to Coast Guard members and our partners are taken extremely seriously."
Every federal agency says some version of that last line. Most of them say it in a press release and then go home.
The cartels have been testing this administration for months, and they keep losing. Between August and September, the military took down at least 11 cartel-linked drones over the sector with high-energy lasers. Cartels fly those drones to watch Border Patrol and time smuggling runs around the agents. Now the U.S. military is burning them out of the sky with directed-energy weapons. Most Americans would have filed that under science fiction.
Under Biden, this same sector posted record crossings while agents were pulled off the river to process asylum paperwork. Cartel scouts sat on the Mexican bank in plain view. The Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel effectively ran the river, and Washington's plan was to keep the numbers quiet, rotate the talking points and hope nobody looked too closely.
Then a cartel crew shot at the Coast Guard, and the answer came by helicopter.
The Coast Guard said it takes threats to its people extremely seriously. Six days later, 500 American soldiers were standing on the river to prove it.