In March 2021, the governor of Texas Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, an ongoing state-run response to the “ongoing crisis” at the Texas border with Mexico. Its official purpose is to “detect and repel illegal crossings, arrest human smugglers and cartel gang members, and stop the flow of deadly drugs like fentanyl into our nation” through the use of the Texas National Guard and other law enforcement agencies. Since its inception, the Texas state government has so far expended over $11 billion to reach these goals, amounting to about $2.5 million per week, with the budget expected to increase by about $2 billion annually in the coming years. Operation Lone Star has drawn widespread criticism for its inhumane and ineffective deterrent policies, representing a costly and unsustainable response to a systemic issue decades in the making.
Texas’s 1,200-mile border with Mexico is the longest of any state and is a focal point in US border securitization measures. The situation at the border has been a topic of intense political debate for decades, but it entered a new phase of intensity after a confluence of factors created a surge in crossings at the beginning of 2021.
In May 2021, Abbott declared a state of emergency for 34 counties near the border (later increased to 58) in response to a surge in migrant crossings, which the governor blamed on President Biden’s border policies. This declaration empowered him to deploy the Texas National Guard, while the Operation Lone Star initiative also included increased funding for local law enforcement and the installation of dangerous physical barriers along the border. In May 2023, Abbott renewed this emergency declaration and deployed special units of the Texas National Guard, named the “Texas Tactical Border Force.”
Governor Abbott blamed the 2021 increase in migrant crossings in Texas and the subsequent need for Operation Lone Star on President Biden’s immigration policies. While it is true that February 2021–the first month of the Biden presidency–saw a peak in border crossings, this was largely due to Title 42, a group of policies adopted by the Trump administration in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Under Title 42, undocumented migrants who were not children or families were arrested and immediately sent back across the border without the opportunity to ask for their right to asylum. This created a cycle of deportation and re-entry, as many of the people expelled under Title 42 simply tried to cross again, inflating the number of border crossings. The numbers had also risen due to the economic challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and natural disasters, mainly hurricanes, driving displacement.
Operation Lone Star is not an immigration policy—only the federal government has the power to pass legislation about immigration, and the extent to which states can enforce those laws remains a subject of debate. While the Texas National Guard cannot enforce federal immigration laws, under the March 2021 disaster declaration, Abbott directed state forces to arrest migrants on reinforced Texas trespassing laws when they are found on private property, which includes a majority of the land along the Texas-Mexico border. The rest of the operation is managed through the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), which is responsible for the majority of arrests related to the operation, and the Texas Military Department.
According to a 2024 report by the Texas ACLU, Operation Lone Star has led to at least 38,030 arrests so far, as reported by the DPS. Of these arrests, 40% were for misdemeanours, with the majority of the charges being drug offences, trespassing, and the transport of persons. By contrast, according to the Texas Court Administration (OCA), only 13,306 of these arrests have appeared before a magistrate, with 70% of the court appearances involving only misdemeanours, and 68% involving trespassing. Furthermore, among the cases that made it to court, the majority of drug-related, human transport, or weapons-related were against U.S. citizens, while the majority of trespassing charges were against Mexican citizens and people of other Latin American nationalities.
In April 2022, Governor Abbott announced that as part of Operation Lone Star, the state would begin busing migrants recently released from federal custody to other cities throughout the country. It is a free bus trip to a designated city and operates on a voluntary basis, making it an attractive offer for many migrants. Transporting migrants further into the country was already a hallmark of migrant reception services in major border cities, such as El Paso. Many migrants have family or friends already in the country, and the existing network of shelters and services is able to help them acquire tickets, coordinate with shelters in other cities, and humanely transport them to the Houston airport. Operation Lone Star buses operate outside of this network and have been known to leave migrants in the destination cities at odd hours, with no warning to the receiving shelters. The busing operation has been labelled a ‘political stunt’ by many observers, largely because of this deliberate lack of cohesion, Governor Abbott’s declarations that the program is in protest of these cities’ open border policies, and a few incidents of leaving busloads of migrants in front of politicians’ houses without warning. Two years later, this program has resulted in the transportation of over 100,000 migrants to cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Chicago.
Operation Lone Star also includes the implementation of various physical barriers along the border. Since 2021, 34 miles of border wall have been constructed in non-contiguous sections, built with tall steel bollards. Progress is moving slowly because most of the Texas-Mexico border is actually private property, and has to be secured by the government through a legal process called ‘eminent domain’ before the wall can be built. So far, the wall has cost about $25 million per mile, though this is a small fraction of the $3 billion in state funds allocated to the border wall and an additional $55 million in public donations.
Most recently, in June 2023 Gov. Abbott deployed hazardous barriers in parts of the Rio Grande River, which spans the length of the Texas-Mexico border. The river border, concentrated near Eagle Pass, now includes a string of buoys over a thousand feet long, weighted to the bottom with steel cables and concrete and equipped with razor blades at their base, to prevent people from swimming below them. The Texas bank of the river is a wall of steel container compartments and thick razor wire, which was also put underneath the river’s surface.
The floating wall quickly became part of a legal dispute, as the US Department of Justice sued Gov. Abbott on the basis that the barrier was an obstruction to the waterway and therefore required federal permission to be built. In the letter expressing its intent to sue, the federal government also noted its concern for the humanitarian, public safety, and environmental threats posed by the structure. Furthermore, the Abbott administration has not produced sufficient evidence for its claim that the barrier prevents drug and people trafficking. Abbott has vowed to take the dispute all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Operation Lone Star is the most recent example of the US’s favouring of temporary, repressive policies to suppress immigration that makes no attempt to combat the root causes of the issue. The real issue is that it is nearly impossible to legally cross the border in the United States. The pathways to enter the country legally are not equipped to handle present-day realities and take years of waiting, but the politicization of the issue has made it nearly impossible to effect change. US immigration law has not been meaningfully reformed since the 1990s due to Congressional deadlock, resulting in what both parties concede is a broken system. Temporary solutions such as Operation Lone Star package a complex and systemic issue into a more simple ‘crisis’ that can be confronted through increased military and securitization instead of the needed overhaul of immigration law and policy.
Edited By Sofia Gobin
