It’s been a year since Gov. Greg Abbott announced Operation Lone Star, his heavily hyped, multibillion-dollar mission to stop drugs and undocumented immigrants from crossing the Mexican border into Texas. Abbott insisted the mission was necessary because the Biden administration wasn’t doing its job on the border.
Is it working? Texas lawmakers and journalists are asking that and other serious questions. Abbott’s answers don’t inspire confidence.
A troubling Texas Tribune/Pro Publica investigation published recently showed Abbott’s administration withholding or distorting facts about his border crackdown and unable to back up boasts about its success. The report found Operation Lone Star’s arrest numbers suspect, with the state taking credit for apprehensions made by local police before the program began. The Department of Public Safety had also counted arrests hundreds of miles from the border in areas not included in the operation’s mission.
Texas lawmakers throw staggering amounts of taxpayer money at border security. Texans should demand transparency and accurate data with which to determine if Abbott’s border initiative is working.
In June, the governor shifted Operation Lone Star’s focus from the Rio Grande Valley, where political support was spotty, to a vast expanse of rural private ranches around Val Verde County, an hour’s drive or more from the border. Now, it appears wealthy private ranchers are a chief beneficiary of the governor’s taxpayer-funded border policing expedition. National Guard members assigned to these patrols report having spent a lot of time standing around, rarely spotting illegal border crossings.
Against this backdrop, the Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Military Department have stonewalled two dozen public records requests from media outlets trying to take stock of Operation Lone Star’s accomplishments.
This isn’t how accountable government is supposed to work. This is how an opportunistic politician panders for votes while spending billions in tax dollars and misleading the public about the return on investment. The lack of transparency and political posturing should trouble all Texans, as Abbott’s border operations will cost taxpayers $3 billion through 2023.
At a rally just before the March 1 primary election, the governor’s reelection campaign used the border mission in a crass attempt to capitalize on the deadly fentanyl epidemic. The campaign passed out empty pill bottles with labels that tried to blame Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke with fentanyl deaths that occurred on Abbott’s watch.
“Beto Biden open border,” the labels read, noting that 1,334 Texans died from fentanyl overdoses in 2021. The pill bottles credited Operation Lone Star with seizing 887 pounds of fentanyl in Texas. But only 160 of those pounds were seized in regions assigned to the task force, the Tribune-ProPublica investigation revealed.
Inaccurate or misleading data used to advance Abbott’s political agenda has real-life consequences. National Guard members deployed to the border as part of Operation Lone Star have had their lives disrupted, reportedly forced to live and work in deplorable conditions, without a clear mission and adequate supplies, and with their paychecks habitually delayed. In late December, the Army Times reported that four National Guardsmen deployed in the operation shot and killed themselves during a two-month span in late 2021. The Texas Military Department denied allegations about poor working conditions.
When the number of National Guard members at the border ticked up to a whopping 10,000 in January, Abbott and leading Republican lawmakers shifted almost half a billion dollars from the DPS, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to cover it, the Tribune-ProPublica investigation found.
Border security and immigration are shaping up as a major issue in the 2022 race for governor between Abbott and O’Rourke. A University of Texas/Texas Politics poll last month showed these issues top Texans’ list of policy concerns. We share the concern, and a legitimate debate is warranted.
At a January Senate hearing on the operation, Sen. Bob Hall, a Rockwall Republican, tried to engage that debate.
“How do we know whether the amount of money was appropriate for what was needed?” Hall asked, according to the Tribune-ProPublica report. “And how do we know when we’ve accomplished what we set out to do, so that we can figure out what to do next, other than just appropriate more money and then wonder what to do next?”
Great questions — and ones the governor and his top law enforcement officials should answer immediately. Texas taxpayers and the men and women charged with carrying out this mission deserve no less.
Austin American-Statesman
