This idea came to me while watching another of the innumerable videos of illegal aliens piling out of pickup trucks at/near the Rio Grande and scattering into the Texas brush, trying to escape.

A bola is a pair of weights tied together by a length of cord

used to capture animals by entangling their legs. Bolas were most famously used by the gauchos….

My thought is this. Arm (some of) our Border Patrol agents with these, with specially designed slingshots or modified beanbag-firing shotguns to propel them, to capture fleeing illegal aliens and their coyotes. Bolas also can be hand-thrown to good effect—and originally were—but only from closer ranges, which may not always obtain.

Bolas are range-limited by their nature and nonlethal. Their use would take training, but no more than the gaucho who uses them on his ranch, or than the police need with their beanbag-firing shotguns. An additional advantage is that it will take some time for an illegal alien/coyote to disentangle himself from the bola, enabling a following Ranger to finish securing several illegals while the bola-armed Ranger continues pursuit, rather than the [two] of them having to capture and secure illegals one at a time.