TX Tribune: “Operation Lone Star has helped increase the state’s budget for border security to more than $3 billion through 2023 by deploying thousands of DPS troopers and National Guard members and allocating funding to build border barriers. As part of the operation, troopers are also arresting some immigrant men crossing into the U.S. on state criminal trespassing charges.
Abbott and DPS have repeatedly boasted in news conferences, on social media and during interviews on Fox News that the border operation has disrupted drug and human smuggling networks. A year into the operation, officials touted more than 11,000 criminal arrests, drug seizures that amount to millions of “lethal doses” and the referrals of tens of thousands of unauthorized immigrants to the federal government for deportation as signs that the program is effective.
But the state’s claim of success has been based on shifting metrics that included crimes with no connection to the border, work conducted by troopers stationed in targeted counties prior to the operation, and arrest and drug seizure efforts that do not clearly distinguish DPS’s role from that of other agencies, an investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and The Marshall Project found.
King-Randall’s charges were among more than 2,000, including some for cockfighting, sexual assault and stalking, that the agency stopped counting toward Operation Lone Star more than nine months into the exercise, after the news organizations began raising questions about the ties between the arrests and border security. Of those, about 270 charges were for violent crimes, which are defined by the FBI as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.”