A Southwest Texas Paper Folded. A Conspiracy-Spewing Facebook Streamer Took Its Place.
In late September, rumors erupted on local Del Rio Facebook pages that Haitian migrants on a plane leaving the airport for repatriation had begun to riot. Karen Gleason, a crime reporter for the 830 Times, a local news outlet that stepped up last November to fill a news void when the 136-year-old Del Rio News-Herald folded, went to the airport to investigate. There she found a host of law enforcement officers gathering around a single migrant who had fainted. There had been no riot. Gleason decided there wasn’t a story to pursue and went home.
Frank Lopez Jr. saw the same scene and decided, instead, to broadcast it. The former chair of the Val Verde County Republican Party and a retired Border Patrol agent, Lopez has nearly 22,000 followers from across the country on Facebook, where he livestreams under the moniker “US Border Patriot.” He paced along the airport fence, filming law enforcement and immigration authorities escorting reluctant migrants onto the plane. Even though there wasn’t a riot, Lopez stirred anxiety among his viewers. “They’re dragging ’em in; they don’t want to go; they resist; they fight; they push back . . . imagine when they come to your hometown and they don’t like the way things are,” Lopez said.
Within minutes, he had 38,000 viewers—more than the number of people who live in Del Rio. For nearly two hours, he harangued about immigration policies that repatriated some Haitian migrants while allowing others to pursue asylum in the country. There were no references or authorities cited for context, yet hundreds of appreciative comments for his version of truth telling came pouring in. One representative commenter wrote that Lopez “is out there and putting [his] life on the line to show us the truth.”
Del Rio, Lopez’s base, briefly became the center of national media attention in September as about 15,000 Haitian migrants gathered under the international bridge there. But after national journalists, who filled every hotel and room for rent for about three weeks, left town, there were few reporters to tell local stories. Val Verde County, of which Del Rio is the seat, had become one of more than twenty Texas news deserts, defined by the University of North Carolina as communities with limited access to credible and comprehensive news and information, after the News-Herald folded last year. That’s left room for Lopez to fill an information gap.
Read more: https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/del-rio-border-patriot-news-desert/
I did use the Del Rio News-Herald as a source for a few threads prior to the publication folding.
