The Journal. - Texas Took On Border Security. Is It Working?

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

For two years, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has inundated the U.S.-Mexico border with thousands of state troopers and National Guardsmen and started work on a state-controlled border wall. He also built a new skeleton justice system with its own courts, judges and jails to lodge misdemeanor state trespassing charges against migrants. WSJ’s Elizabeth Findell discusses Operatio n Lone Star and whether or not it’s been successful. Further Reading: - Texas Spent Billions on Border Security. It’s Not Working.   - Texas Trooper’s Email Describes Migrant Injuries at Southern Border  Further Listening: - What the End of Title 42 Means for U.S. Immigration Policy  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our colleague Elizabeth Findel covers Texas, and recently she was in a town called Eagle Pass, about two and a half hours west of San Antonio, right on the border with Mexico. I would love for you to describe what you saw at the border when you were there. Down in Eagle Pass right now, they are trying to create an impenetrable barrier to migrants attempting to cross the river there. They have National Guard soldiers there. They have helicopters in the air. They have dozens of state troopers who are patrolling at any given moment, trying to locate migrants to convince them not to come

across the river. It's so striking to see the extent of the law enforcement presence there and the militarization, the amount of land that's been clear-cut, the amount of razor wire that's fronting the river. This is Operation Lone Star. It's a major effort by the state of Texas to prevent illegal border crossings. It is wide-ranging. It affects many people.

It affects a lot of different portions of law enforcement, and it's very expensive. No state has ever tried to take control of federal border operations to this extent. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Monday, July 24th. Coming up on the show, Texas is taking border control into its own hands.

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but we're going to put people in a jail cell. And Texas is sending a message to any caravan and to any cartel member. We're ready. We're waiting for you. The federal government controls the U.S. border. They manage border crossings, security, and requests for asylum. But Operation Lone Star is a Texas program. It uses state troopers and members of the Texas National Guard.

It's a new and experimental effort by the state of Texas in several ways. Texas has, in the past, had operations where they sent National Guard or Texas Department of Public Safety troopers to the border. But they're doing it to an extent now that they haven't before and with a new goal in mind. The goal is to stop migrants from getting into the U.S. and accessing the asylum process. stop migrants from getting into the U.S. and accessing the asylum process. If people make it to the United States, to U.S. soil, they are legally entitled to go through the asylum process and prove whether or not their lives would be in danger if they were sent home. Which is why Operation Lone Star is trying to stop migrants

from physically crossing the border into the U.S. When migrants do make it, authorities can arrest them on state charges. It's a way to prevent migrants from staying in the U.S. illegally or seeking asylum. They're trying to arrest people on charges that they can assess, to arrest people on charges that they can assess, which in most cases has been arresting people for trespassing, which is a state misdemeanor if they are walking across a ranch that's somebody's private property, for example. Eventually, they're turned over to federal immigration authorities,

who actually have the power to deport them or to allow them to seek asylum. And do we have a sense of how many people have been arrested under Operation Lone Star? Yes, there's a couple of different pools of arrest data. There are about 11,000. Most of those are the misdemeanor criminal trespass arrests, but it also includes a significant number of smuggling arrests, smuggling of people. In addition to those arrests, the state has logged more than 23,600 arrests in 63 counties all across the state that it considers to be part of Operation Lone Star.

across the state that it considers to be part of Operation Lone Star. And so that includes U.S. citizens, non-U.S. citizens with all kinds of charges, some border-related and some not border-related. This effort has cost Texas a lot of money. Since 2021, the state has spent $4.5 billion on Operation Lone Star, and it has allocated another $5.1 billion for the next two years. In the early days, much of that money was pulled from Texas's criminal justice system, which already has a lot of challenges with needing more funding. a lot of challenges with needing more funding. They've pulled from a number of different places around the state. And I think a big question is just how long does this go on? Is this a new normal? Is this something that's going to be baked into the state's budget into the future indefinitely? And what are they spending this money on? services, travel, setting up base camps. And into the future, they're projecting more than a billion dollars a year to maintain that.

A lot of the budget also goes towards supplies, like fuel for vehicles and helicopters, and construction material for barricades, including miles of razor wire. including miles of razor wire. The state of Texas has put up razor wire in multiple layers along the banks of the river that just stretches for miles and miles. Coils of wire down in the water, on the edge of the water, lining the riverbank. That wire has been at the center of allegations raised by a state trooper in an email reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. In the email, he details how migrants had been severely injured.

He described a pregnant 19-year-old who was found trapped in wire wrapped across a barrel while she was having a miscarriage. He described troopers and National Guard members being ordered to, you know, kind of block and push back a four-year-old girl trying to climb ashore before she passed out from the heat. And some really striking and concerning incidents there. The email also said that state law enforcement denied water to migrants as temperatures in the area soared above 100 degrees. Officials for the Texas Department of Public Safety said they're investigating all the incidents detailed in the trooper's email.

DPS also said that it's not the agency's policy to refuse water to migrants and that the razor wire is intended to deter crossings, not to injure people. After two years, thousands of arrests, and billions of dollars spent, Operation Lone Star may not be working. That's next. With Smartwater's pure, crisp taste, there's nothing to overthink.

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Do what moves you. Live passionately. Drink responsibly. Copyright 2024. Bacardi, its trade dress and the bat device are trademarks of Bacardi and Company Limited. Rum 40% alcohol by volume. During the pandemic, federal immigration authorities used a policy called Title 42 to deny and expel migrants, even ones seeking asylum, to protect public health. That's changed since May.

What we saw was a very high increase in border crossings throughout 2021 and 2022, and then they have started to decline pretty significantly since the end of Title 42 in May. And so we can't really attribute any of that decrease at the moment to Operation Lone Star? No, and I think it's difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a program like Operation Lone Star because you're making a significant number of arrests, the governor is touting high numbers of arrests, but is that a sign of success or failure? If your goal is to deter something, then ideally you would want to see a significant number of arrests at first and then see those arrests decline as the deterrence kicked in. But we haven't really seen that with Operation Lone Star. We're still seeing pretty similar numbers of arrests on the migrant trespassing

cases. They've shifted a little bit from county to county, but within the same region, we're still seeing pretty much the same numbers. Why do you think migrants may not be deterred by Operation Lone Star? These people who are coming to the United States are, quite frankly, very desperate, a lot of them. And they have gone through an incredibly dangerous journey to get here. They know that they are risking death. And so when that's your mindset, the idea of spending a few weeks in a county jail is not a significant deterrent. What you're running from is still worse than what you're running toward. Right. Operation Lone Star has also tested the limits of the Texas judicial system, forcing local courts and jails to accommodate an unusually high number of arrests.

And Elizabeth says the program has also been emotionally taxing for some soldiers and troopers in charge of policing. The Texas National Guard has had a pretty difficult time at times with this operation. had a pretty difficult time at times with this operation. Texas National Guard members prior to this were not typically sent on such long deployments within Texas, but Operation Lone Star sent essentially the entire Guard to the border for as long as a year, and that took people away from their families, away from their jobs. And that caused an initial pretty significant morale crisis,

where you had several suicides, you had a lot of very unhappy soldiers. And what does that say to you about the nature of this assignment, of this work? What have they been saying? I think it's stressful and it's stressful in many ways because people are, again, taking away from their homes and their families for a long amount of time. And they're spending 12-hour days driving around looking for immigrants or, you know, sitting in 115-degree heat, looking out at the brush, trying to see something. And so it's very isolated and it can be very boring at times. So I think there's a component of that. Governor Abbott has continued to expand the program and promote it as a success. He has really doubled down on trying to get resources. He sent out a request to other states

to send their police and National Guard to the border. And so about 13 other Republican states are doing that, sending National Guard or state troopers down for these sort of short-term rotations. Texas is also adding more physical barriers along the border. Besides the razor wire, they deployed a separate floating wall on the Rio Grande to stop asylum seekers from making it to U.S. soil. Before immigrants get past state troopers and border patrol, before they get past rows of razor wires, they will have to get past a man-made wall floating in the water. It's essentially a big, almost a wall of buoys that are tied together. Imagine four-foot-wide orange buoys that create a barrier, and they have some sort of metal around the edges,

but the idea is that they're large enough that it's difficult to swim under them and you also can't get over or around them. Between 2017 and 2021, before the buoys were put in place, Border Patrol had logged more than 300 drownings along the southern border. There have been concerns raised by civil rights organizations that it could lead to more drownings. There have been concerns raised by officials in Mexico that it potentially violates treaties between the countries. Earlier today, the Department of Justice sued Texas to remove the floating barriers, and in the meantime is seeking an injunction

to stop the state from building more. Abbott has said previously that he will not take down the barriers. Border security is a top issue for Republicans, and I think many Republicans at all levels are really happy that the governor has made this a priority. And Democrats are not so happy. They think it's a waste of money. They think it's potentially unconstitutional, discriminatory. And as I mentioned, it's very

difficult to gauge whether something like this is effective. So state taxpayers are spending nine and a half billion dollars on this. What are they getting in return? They're getting a lot of arrests, but are those arrests having any greater impact on the number of people coming across the United States-Mexico border? It doesn't appear so. Do you think this is the new normal for immigration policy in Texas? Is there an end in sight to Operation Lone Star? Whether or not there's an end in sight to Operation Lone Star is one of my biggest questions. There doesn't appear to be, certainly not within the next two years when all this money is budgeted for. And even beyond that, I think the Texas Department of Public Safety troopers who I spoke with said that they really think that this is just part of their mission now to do border security.

It will probably always be part of their mission. And so I think that's a really big question is whether the state will continue funding these types of border operations indefinitely into the future. That's all for today, Monday, July 24th. The Journal is a co-production of Gimlet and The Wall Street Journal. If you like our show, follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We're out every weekday afternoon. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.