But migrants were nowhere to be found along the river by Thursday morning in former hot spots like Mission, a city of 87,000 where as recently as December asylum-seekers waited in open fields near a busy international bridge for agents to pick them up, or in many other spots along the winding river lined by thick, giant cane.
On Thursday, 300 Texas Guard members were deputized to conduct immigration arrests alongside Border Patrol agents and enlarge their show of force along the border.
Associated Press journalists accompanying Border Patrol agents in an SUV and on speedboats that traversed 30 miles along the Rio Grande Valley and river for five hours Thursday didn't encounter a single migrant.
Once busy river landings near the Texas border city of Mission were barren of the migrants who previously crossed there, though the river bank was littered with clothes, plastic bracelets issued by smugglers and a teddy bear on an unusually cold Thursday morning.
Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley, home to about 1.4 million people, have been making about 50 arrests a day, down from a daily average of 325 in December and nearly 3,000 on the busiest days of 2021.
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