The town of Dilley is in the South Texas Brush Country, a vast, unforgiving land that a Spanish explorer in 1736 called the país despoblado and many Texans today, whether or not they’ve ever been there, call the middle of nowhere. Eighty-five miles north of the Rio Grande and seventy miles south of San Antonio, the town is just past the edge of the borderlands, occupying a spiny, flat middle at the intersection of Interstate 35 and Highway 85 in far southern Frio County. Eighteen-wheelers rush by en route from Laredo to anywhere. Trucks hauling frack sand leave behind potholes on country roads. Aside from the interstate, there’s little to orient an outsider but the Family Dollar on one end of Main Street, the Dollar General on the other, two water towers, several motels, an old feed mill, and, at night, at the town limits, the lights.
From the pump at the Valero station, you can make out two sets of lights behind the Americas Best Value Inn Extended Stay. The duller, amber ones are at the Dolph Briscoe Unit, a medium-security state prison named after the forty-first governor of Texas. They are outshone by fluorescent ones on the next lot over, not at a prison but something similar: the South Texas Family Residential Center. With twenty-four hundred beds, it’s the largest immigration detention center in the United States and exclusively holds women and their children. Beyond the lights is deep, dark brush. Nothing except the headlights of trucks, the occasional lamp inside a ranch house, gas flares, and the spotlights on the wells, though there are fewer of those now. The whistle of the freight train, why this town is here to begin with, marks time.
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