Texas State Trooper assigned to "Operation Lone Star" keeps watch over the Rio Grande on the Texas - Mexico Border.Photo byTexas Department of Public Safety

Fifteen people have been killed in recent days just across the Rio Grande in West Texas in an explosion of violence that has authorities on both sides of the border worried about what might come next.

Nine people - many of them teenagers - have been killed just across the border from Texas in Mexico in two unrelated incidents blamed on gangs and cartels in recent days. Mexican border officials in the state of Chihuahua have scrambled to respond to the organized violence - and state & federal law enforcement officers on the Texas side of the border are ramping up patrols to keep the situation from spilling over into the United States.

Chihuahua, Mexico State Police address murders at a Ciudad Juarez Quinceañera party just across the border from El Paso, Texas.Photo byChihuahua Mexico State Police

Just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas five teens and young adults were gunned down during a Quinceañera celebration at a Cuidad Juárez home over the weekend that local and state Mexican authorities blamed on rival youth gangs.

More concerning, though, were the murders of six people in cartel shoot-outs Sunday and Monday across the border from Presidio, Texas around Ojinaga, Mexico in the same state of Chihuahua.

Cartel shoot-out scene where multiple people died near Ojinaga, Chihuahua Mexico - just across the river from Presidio, Texas.Photo byTwitter (x.com) via @calvariae_locus

The shooting deaths appear to be the latest in a series of murders in a fight for control over migrant and drug smuggling through Ojinaga/Presidio involving La Linea Cartel.

In June, five Mexican ride-share drivers were executed after driving migrants to Ojinaga (which circumvented La Linea's human-smuggling operations).

It brings to mind the discovery of eleven bodies of migrants - tied to a dispute over La Linea's human-smuggling operations there in 2023 as well as the discovery of thirteen bodies tied to the same dispute there in 2021.

Photo byYuan Yufei - User:Jadecolour / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Besides their violent defense of the human smuggling route through Ojinaga, Mexico & Presidio, Texas La Linea also controls a lucrative drug smuggling route from Chihuahua to the Midland-Odessa/Permian Basin oilfields where workers are flush with cash - so there is concern on both sides of the border that their defense of their "turf" could become even more violent.

Should more be done to prevent Mexican Cartel violence from spilling over the Texas Border?

Share your opinion in the comments on this article!

For more stories like this "Follow Me" on the Newsbreak App and "Like" this article to stay up to date on immigration and border security issues regularly covered by Jack Beavers on Newsbreak like these:

• Texas Border: Truckloads of Migrants Found
• Abbott vs Biden-Harris for "Cartel Island" Control
• Fugitive Criminal Migrants Arrested at Border
• Big Border Drug Busts: Cops vs. Cartels

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