Texas unwinds Operation Lone Star after illegal immigrants stop crossing border
EL PASO, Texas – After four years and more than $11 billion spent battling the worst mass migration border crisis in US history, Texas Gov.Gregg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star has withdrawn almost all state troopers and police personnel from a southern border that quickly fell quiet after President Donald Trump entered office.Texas has quietly stood down its state police, criminal investigations agents, Texas Rangers, and SWAT teams off the 1,954-miles of Rio Grande for the first time in four years, officials confirmed when recently asked why they were conspicuously absent from the El Paso-Juarez region. The withdrawal amounts to a kind of “peace dividend” for state law enforcement officers after years of border chaos.Operation Lone Star still exists but has shifted to the Texas interior, working crime related to the border, Lt.
Chris Olivarez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, acknowledged. “We’re just repositioning troopers now away from the river because lot fewer people coming across,” Olivarez said.“There are more soldiers, national guard, and more infrastructure, but a lot less crossings, so we’re going back to traditional criminal interdiction work.
If something were to happen, we can scale back up quickly.”They’ve also repositioned to help US Immigration and Customs Enforcement hunt down criminal aliens in Texas cities, Olivarez said.DPS air and boat units remain on patrol, albeit scaled to align with illegal crossing levels.Texas National Guard forces will remain at the border at least through August, the duration of current funding, Olivarez said, and now deputized to make immigration arrests.All this reflects a dramatic sea change since March 2021, when Gov.
Abbott ordered thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guard to fill gaps on the line created when the Biden administration decided to accept most illegal border crossers into the country and ordered US Border Patrol off the line to staff “process...