Six $83,000 pickup trucks. K-9 dog food. A pink-trimmed concrete office jokingly described as the Taj Mahal.
Since 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott’s highly-touted Operation Lone Star has sent more than $100 million to Texas counties, in grants earmarked for border security purposes — but in reality, the funding has also covered items like office renovations and equipment seemingly unrelated to immigration enforcement.
An investigation from the San Antonio Express-News and the Houston Chronicle found that Abbott’s taxpayer-funded, multimillion-dollar border crackdown has financed counties far from the state’s southern border, has been inconsistently managed, and vaguely justified.
And as border crossings decline, the stream of money has stayed relatively steady.
In Maverick County, where Eagle Pass is, the new county attorney’s building was funded by Operation Lone Star. It was introduced as a way to help prosecute misdemeanors when suspected undocumented immigrants trespassed on private property.
The building has pink trim and is complete with showers, a workout room and also serves as an office for Maverick County Attorney Jaime Iracheta’s private legal practice, according to the report from the Express.
In statements to the newspapers, county officials were unapologetic about the extra cash; they said they welcome the upgrades, despite the county auditor’s concerns that courtrooms built with the money are being used for non-border related cases.
Operation Lone Star launched in 2021, when Abbott issued a disaster declaration, and deployed hundreds of Texas National Guard troops to the border — to the tune of “four middle- finger emojis,” according to a leaked morale survey from January 2022, first reported by The Texas Tribune and Military Times.
“I’m wasting time watching the grass grow at my (observation) point (along the border),” one trooper wrote in their anonymous feedback form.
While questions started to arise about Abbott’s border operations, a March 2022 investigation from The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and The Marshall Project discovered that Operation Lone Star was costing taxpayers a mind-boggling $2.5 million per week.
“Operation Lone Star personnel work around-the-clock with federal partners to deter and repel illegal crossings, arrest human smugglers and cartel gang members, and stop the flow of deadly drugs like fentanyl into our nation,” according to Abbott’s website.
Operation Lone Star was launched in response to “the Biden Administration’s reckless open border policies,” according to Abbott’s website — but even as border crossings have dropped months into the new Trump administration, the operation’s grants went “largely untouched,” as reported by the San Antonio Express-News and the Houston Chronicle.
Texas’ mega-spending bill, which was approved by the Legislature in May, will allocate $3 billion of the state’s $338 billion budget toward border security, and will allow Abbott to keep up Operation Lone Star’s grant costs.
Meanwhile, counties with “minimal or no surge in migrant crossings” have become increasingly reliant on Lone Star funding, using grant money to pay salaries and maintain necessary operations — losing that state funding “could cripple us,” a councilman from Eagle Pass told Chronicle and Express-News reporters.
Goliad County, about 200 miles from the Mexican border, has used its $3 million of Lone Star money to purchase “six pickups, a van and an eighth vehicle for which no description was available in state records,” according to the reporting.
“The justification for about $900,000 of the county’s Lone Star spending was redacted from state records,” according to the reporting. “That spending included $281,000 for ‘surveillance equipment and accessories,’ $342,000 for ‘specialized equipment and software’ and $140,000 on items identified only as ‘equipment.’”
Not everyone is on board with the free flow of money. Maverick County Commissioner Jerry Morales has spoken up about the years-long delays of trying to get basic roads and water infrastructure in some of the poorest parts of his Texas county.
“You don’t have any oversight there,” Morales said of Operation Lone Star to the Express. “But man, when I’m applying for a sewer connection grant, you want me to dot every single i and cross every single t.”
