The family of four crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico, then walked for hours on U.S. soil between the river and the hulking steel border wall that runs through the area, avoiding the concertina wire strung along the river banks, trying to find a federal Border Patrol agent so they could surrender and pursue an asylum claim in the United States.
But the Texas National Guard saw them first. Soldiers have been deployed to the border since 2021, on the orders of the state’s right-wing governor.
The soldiers called them vulgar names. The father saw soldiers being aggressive with other migrants, forcing them back across the river, and so the family ran for the border wall.
A soldier approached them. The father held one of his two young sons close to his chest, he would later recall. The soldier hit the father in the chin with the butt of his rifle. Another soldier ran in front of the man’s wife and his other son, knocking them to the ground and kicking the son in the leg.
Guard members positioned trucks between the scene and the Rio Grande, blocking the view of anyone in Mexico. Nonetheless, the family made it to the wall and grabbed hold of it. One soldier told them they’d received orders to break the arms of people clinging to the wall, but the family stayed.
They were a few hundred yards from Gate 36, an opening in the border wall in El Paso and frequent crossing point for migrants — and also, a concentration point for Texas soldiers tasked by the governor with trying to “deter” them. One of the soldiers pointed a gun at the family. “If you run, we have the right to shoot,” they said.
Eventually, the family was allowed to proceed toward the gate. But the National Guard wasn’t done with them.
“One of the soldiers told us we have 15 seconds to run the remaining 400-500 meters to Gate 36,” the father recalled. The family took off running. Two soldiers drove alongside the family in a truck.
“One of the soldiers was filming us and laughing, blasting music from the truck,” the father recalled. “I felt like I was being treated like an animal.” They’d reached the United States.
Later, the father recounted the story over several hours to Danny Woodward, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project who’s worked alongside others for months to collect this and other accounts, and who shared details of the father’s account with HuffPost. Aspects of the story are included in an upcoming report TCRP is publishing with the Border Network for Human Rights.
To Woodward, the story is just one example of the “sadistic games” Texas soldiers have played along the border. The attorney said the father’s story isn’t unique and that he’s heard multiple stories with similar elements of physical abuse, verbal abuse and sadism, particularly over the past year. The Texas Military Department did not comment on the details of the family’s story.
Operation Lone Star began in March 2021, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) launched what would become a multiyear, multibillion-dollar effort to deputize thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers and state troopers to guard the border, in order to “detect and repel illegal crossings” into the United States. Abbott has sent soldiers from across the state to the southern border as if it were a disaster zone. There, soldiers told HuffPost, they’re made to look intimidating, with rifles and camouflage uniforms, putting on a show both for migrants and the general public.
Soldiers and state troopers working under Operation Lone Star have installed millions of dollars of concertina wire across the border with Mexico. And they’ve arrested thousands of migrants for misdemeanor trespass violations if they happen to stray onto private land. But they haven’t arrested anyone for crossing the border illegally. That’s because immigration and border enforcement is a federal job, not left to the states.
Nearly every Republican governor in the country signed onto a letter supporting the operation, and more than a dozen of them have sent their own state’s personnel and resources to Texas as a show of support.
Donald Trump, who has called for the mass deportation of every undocumented person in the United States — and whose key advisers have spoken openly about constructing mass prison camps along the border — received Abbott’s endorsement last November during a campaign stop in front of a smattering of military vehicles along the border.
“He’s doing the job of what the federal government is supposed to be doing,” Trump said of Abbott. “And I’m just telling you, mister governor, I am going to make your job much easier.” The Republican Party platform, penned a few months later, calls for “moving thousands of Troops currently stationed overseas to our own Southern Border.”
Meanwhile, as the days leading up to what is expected to be an incredibly close election dwindle — and despite the border being much quieter now than a few months ago, due in part to the Biden administration’s asylum crackdown — Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have aggressively ramped up their dehumanizing rhetoric about immigrants, falsely blaming them for everything from housing costs to infectious disease rates to federal emergency response funding. Trump has long said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our nation,” echoing Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric.
Abbott has pushed the boundaries of just how much states can do on their own, offering a preview of what Trump and Vance might unleash upon the border — and the people who try to cross it. And recently, that includes the state’s National Guard being used as a human “gauntlet,” as Woodward put it, discouraging migrants from exercising their legal right to pursue asylum in the United States through physical force.
In a statement to HuffPost, the Texas Military Department said, in part, “Operation Lone Star maintains comprehensive accountability and oversight for all Service Members,” and that the department is “committed to ensuring that the civil rights of all persons are respected regardless of their status while simultaneously enforcing the laws of the State of Texas.”
Testifying at a hearing on Operation Lone Star last week in the Texas House of Representatives, Abbott’s “border czar,” Mike Banks, who took the job last year, said soldiers have been tasked with becoming a “deterrent” rather than simply sending asylum-seekers to Border Patrol officers so their legal claims can be processed.
“We went to more of a ‘prevent, deter, and interdict’ mode,” Banks said, arguing that migrants follow “the path of least resistance” when making the trek to the United States. “We created a path of greater resistance by having those soldiers out there, by putting up that temporary infrastructure, that has pushed that traffic to other locations.”
The “resistance,” it turns out, consists of a lot more than charging people with misdemeanor trespassing. A growing body of evidence and accounts from migrants and soldiers themselves, as well as shelter operators, lawyers and activists, suggests that members of the Texas National Guard have gotten hands-on with migrants — abusing them physically and tormenting them mentally.
“The Guard sees themselves as a deterrence mechanism placed by the state,” Woodward said. “But either they don’t have any training in how to do that humanely, or they’re actually being ordered to mistreat migrants.”
‘Pain As Strategy’
The culture of Operation Lone Star starts at the top. Abbott said earlier this year that his soldiers were doing everything they could to keep people out of the country short of “shooting” them — “because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
The soldiers seem to have been listening. Members of the National Guard patrolling the border as part of Operation Lone Star have repeatedly assaulted migrants and asylum-seekers, fired “less-than-lethal” projectiles at them, pushed them into concertina wire, and threatened to kill them, according to public reports and accounts given to attorneys, activists and staff in shelters along the border.
The Texas Military Department statement said that Operation Lone Star has “well-established” use-of-force rules, that service members are not permitted to use “any privately purchased weapons or crowd control systems,” and that rubber bullets, tear gas, OC spray, pepper spray and tasers “are not issued systems for Operation Lone Star.” Still, in June, the leader of the Texas National Guard, Maj. Gen. Thomas M. Suelzer, acknowledged Operation Lone Star’s use of pepper ball guns. Suelzer said during legislative testimony that soldiers are trained to “hit an inanimate object” with the balls to saturate a given area with the chemical. “We specifically train them: Do not shoot directly at an individual because if hit in the wrong place, it can cause serious bodily injury,” he said.
In practice, soldiers and troopers end up “engaging in cat-and-mouse pursuits with migrants,” as The New York Times put it last October, in an article describing 10 days of video footage of the El Paso border area. The footage showed soldiers trapping a woman and her child against rolls of concertina wire and pulling a man away from the border by his shirt. It also showed people ensnared in the concertina wire.
Some migrants “turn back” to Mexico, but those that make it to the Border Patrol are processed the same as any other migrant or asylum-seeker who’s crossed between a port of entry. And the immigration cases of people charged by the state with trespassing are not necessarily affected by a conviction; ironically, those defendants are entitled to be represented by taxpayer-funded attorneys, a right not afforded to people in immigration court.
“At the end of this story, they are turned over and basically released into our general population. So we haven’t really prevented anyone from being here illegally, we’ve only slowed down the process, and arguably, may have spent more money in that process in doing so?” state Rep. David Spiller (R) asked a panel of state officials during last week’s hearing. “Not to say that that’s a bad thing. But I think we need to look at it and be honest with ourselves about what we’re doing here. Would you disagree with that?”
“I think your assessment is accurate,” responded Megan LaVoie, administrative director for the Texas Office of Court Administration.
“I just know that when Operation Lone Star started, we started seeing injuries that we had not seen before.”
- Medical director of a nongovernmental migrant shelter near the border
Most soldiers deployed to the border are likely motivated more by their sense of service — and the operation’s paycheck — than animosity toward migrants. Some even show true heroism in their efforts to help people at the border. The best known example of this is Bishop Evans, 22, who drowned in the Rio Grande in 2022 after jumping in the river to help two migrants who were being swept away in the surging current. The two migrants survived. Evans did not.
Still, there’s ample evidence of the toll of Operation Lone Star on the bodies of people it was designed to repel.
“I just know that when Operation Lone Star started, we started seeing injuries that we had not seen before,” the medical director of a nongovernmental migrant shelter near the border told HuffPost.
The worst of it, the medical director said, came from concertina wire, miles of which Texas soldiers have strung across the border with Mexico, and particularly along the slippery banks of the Rio Grande. In April, Abbott celebrated Operation Lone Star putting up “more than 100 miles of razor wire” — the equivalent of over 5% of the total length of the border between the United States and Mexico.
Earlier this year, footage surfaced that appeared to show soldiers pushing migrants into the wire, in an effort to compel them to go back to Mexico.
Other concertina wire injuries come from people trying to slip through the wire to reach U.S. Border Patrol officials, so they can surrender and request asylum in the United States. ln a two-month span last summer, Texas state troopers treated 133 migrants for razor wire injuries, the Houston Chronicle reported — and it’s unclear how many people went without treatment at all.
The medical director, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of their position, relayed accounts from nurses who had treated migrants injured by the wire, including children under 5 years old.
The injuries range from inch-long cuts on extremities, where migrants were caught on the wire while being pulled through it, to one man who looked like he’d “had a lung removed,” with a scar “from the nipple from one [side of his] chest all the way around the ribcage onto the back, just sliced open,” they said. Last year, several outlets reported on one trooper’s account of a pregnant woman having a miscarriage after being caught in the wire, as well as a 4-year-old girl who was pushed back by soldiers after trying to pass through the wire and who then passed out from heat exhaustion.
The medical director also relayed stories of clusters of migrants shot at with projectiles by members of Operation Lone Star, and people, including children, with faces “scalded” from what appeared to be a crowd control chemical. The use of those chemicals has gotten so common, they said, that they established a protocol for dealing with them — a change of clothes and a wash, as quickly as possible.
“Their eyes are burning, their faces are burning,” they said. “We’ve seen just– scalded children, their little faces and cheeks. That stuff is really caustic.”
Accounts of these types of injuries are widespread.
This past spring, a nonprofit organization that operates a mobile clinic on the Mexican side of the border, Hope Border Institute, began seeing more migrants who said they’d encountered fired projectiles and crowd control chemicals at the border — even when they didn’t present a threat to Texas soldiers.
In April, the Institute brought its mobile clinic near the Rio Grande on the Mexican side of the border, across from a concentration of razor wire in the El Paso area — where some migrants would briefly live in temporary encampments in hopes of more easily crossing over to the United States. A few days prior, a confrontation between a large group of migrants and National Guard members at the border made national news reports. Hundreds were charged with rioting, but the majority of those charges were later dismissed.
The following month “is when we really started to see the abuses in a significant level, with the rubber bullets and a huge number of verbal and physical abuses — person-to-person — and the tear gas,” said Aimée Santillán, policy analyst at the Institute.
In a report this year, “Pain as Strategy,” the Institute and another group, Derechos Humanos Integrales en Acción, included several accounts from migrants of the Texas National Guard firing “pepper spray canisters as well as rubber bullets” at families sheltering at informal encampments along the border — even “multiple instances” while the families were sleeping or resting on the Mexican side of the border. (The Texas Military Department did not comment on the report.)
“Families we have assisted have detailed how they have had to cover babies and children with their bodies in order to prevent the shots from injuring them,” the report said. “Others have detailed how the gas asphyxiated them and forced them to flee.” The report tallied at least 25 projectile-related injuries among clinic patients across less than two months, many among men trying to protect family and friends. Injuries included “severe damage to legs, arms and faces,” the report said.
It detailed the case of one man, previously beaten up by Mexican immigration agents, who fell into the Rio Grande river bank and broke his clavicle after Texas agents shot at him with pepper balls. The Texas Tribune noted the addition of pepper ball guns to soldiers’ arsenals in June, describing them as resembling paintball guns, holding about 180 rounds, and being powered by carbon dioxide cartridges. An accompanying video included the state’s position that the guns were meant for “area saturation” and not to be specifically shot at migrants — but the report also noted accounts from migrants themselves who said they’d been hit and injured by the pepper balls.
Last month, Human Rights Watch interviewed people who said they saw a National Guard member in a boat fire at a migrant who’d crossed onto U.S. soil, in Eagle Pass, Texas, and who was reportedly in or near the razor wire there and not doing anything threatening. According to HRW, witnesses saw the projectile hit the migrant, who reportedly fell and did not get up, and did not receive aid from nearby soldiers.
“I saw a national guardsman in the boat train his gun on the man and then he pepper balled him,” an Eagle Pass resident who was visiting Piedras Negras at the time and witnessed the incident told HRW. “He shot him four or five times. I saw the puffs of smoke and the man went down, and he didn’t get up again. It looked to me like they were aiming at the person, not around him or at his feet. It was disturbing.”
Also last month, the Washington Office on Latin America, or WOLA, compiled a lengthy list of similar reports from English- and Spanish-language media outlets and human rights groups documenting incidents of force “even when there is no self-defense justification.” (The Texas Military Department did not comment on the compilation.)
Several media reports cited by WOLA, including from news agency EFE, Eagle Pass Business Journal and Border Report, detailed Texas soldiers’ use of projectiles, such as pepper balls, as did footage broadcast by Noticias 45 Houston and Noticias Telemundo. Other reports, including from El Diario de Juárez, conveyed accounts of migrants being forced back across the barbed wire. Last October, footage emerged appearing to show a soldier in a National Guard uniform, armed with a rifle, saying in Spanish, “I have no mercy, animals,” as they jostled a man attempting to crawl under Texas’ concertina wire to reunite with his family, who were waiting nearby.
At a Border Network for Human Rights press conference last month, Woodward relayed the account of the “sadistic game” at the border, and Fernando Garcia and Alan Lizarraga of BNHR read migrants’ accounts of soldiers threatening them with guns, hitting a child, and choking one person with the strap of a bag.
Beneath The Surface
Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Operation Lone Star is the persistent sense — including among people who work directly on the border — of secrecy and a lack of oversight.
One National Guard soldier who spoke with HuffPost, “Mike,” recalled an incident that still bothers him.
The day after Christmas last year, a Venezuelan family of five took their first steps into the United States, also near Gate 36.
Then, just after passing the concertina wire erected by the state of Texas, they were run over by a pickup truck operated by a Texas National Guard soldier. The truck hit three members of the family — the father, 36, and two of his children, a boy and girl ages 5 and 8.
Texas soldiers began treatment on the family; then, Border Patrol medics picked them up and brought them to the gate. From there, two El Paso ambulances brought the family to a nearby hospital. Within a day, the family was released from custody. They went to a local shelter, where they stayed for two weeks. Then, they moved on.
It may have been a simple car accident along the border. But Mike, who is being identified by a pseudonym because he is still in the National Guard, was troubled by details of the incident.
For one thing, National Guardsmen had been instructed to drive just 5 miles per hour while patrolling the border, given the potential for migrants to suddenly appear from behind brush as they sought out authorities in order to surrender and pursue asylum, Mike said. On top of that, he knew soldiers who’d lashed out at migrants, driven by animus toward them, or frustration with the mission.
The incident, which has not been previously reported, was not publicly acknowledged by the Texas National Guard at the time. And HuffPost was unable to reach the family hit by the truck.
Border Patrol medic reports, obtained via a public records request, referred to the father being “ran over by a vehicle” and to he and his children being “struck by TXNG vehicle.” An incident report shared in a regional text message group for Texas National Guard soldiers and obtained by HuffPost described a male adult and female child “hit ... with the rover truck” and accused the family of trying to run in front of the vehicle. And the director of the migrant shelter where the family stayed after being released from custody confirmed their stay at the shelter.
In its statement, the Texas Military Department acknowledged an “auto-pedestrian incident” on Dec. 26 “with two illegal immigrants sustaining non-life-threatening injuries.” The Texas Department of Public Safety investigated the incident “and found that illegal immigrants negligently ran in front of an Operation Lone Star vehicle as they darted from under border barrier,” the statement said.
“It seemed like, as more and more anger and confusion built up, more soldiers started lashing out at migrants in ways they felt like they could probably get away with.”
- Soldier in the Texas National Guard
Mike saw a pattern in Operation Lone Star. Some soldiers, he believed, had grown frustrated with the operation, particularly its use-of-force policies, which they felt were vague and inconsistently applied, leaving them nervous, on the one hand, about potentially getting in trouble for protecting themselves against “aggressive” migrants, but also allowing soldiers who disliked the migrants leeway to potentially abuse them.
“It seemed like, as more and more anger and confusion built up, more soldiers started lashing out at migrants in ways they felt like they could probably get away with,” he said.
Operation Lone Star had also taken many soldiers out of their “organic” units — that is, the groups they train with occasionally while not deployed — and scrambled them into ad hoc units on the border, under different chains of command. This makes the disciplinary process more convoluted — “a giant cluster,” Mike said. “So people were getting away with a lot of stuff.”
Mike told HuffPost he knew of soldiers who weren’t trained or authorized to use “less-than-lethal” methods but had used them anyway — in at least one case, a Taser — usually buying the equipment themselves at police supply stores.
What’s more, soldiers, riding two to a truck, were frequently alone with whoever they saw crossing the border, he said, and it was up to them to report encounters, particularly in more isolated areas out of Border Patrol’s sight.
“I didn’t have to report anything I didn’t want to report,” Mike said. “You don’t have to say nothing if you don’t want to.”
“We didn’t wear body cams,” he added. “Our vehicles don’t have dash cams. A lot of times, we were operating not alone, but essentially alone, because if you have the same mindset as the other people in your vehicle, and you’re perched up somewhere kind of far away from any other units, you have much more freedom to do things, good or bad.”
Like other soldiers HuffPost has spoken to, Mike was troubled by what he saw.
“There was no real accountability,” he said.
In its statement to HuffPost, the Texas Military Department said Operation Lone Star security teams “conduct a post-shift brief to review events that occurred during the shift” and that “throughout shifts, a Sergeant of the Guard drives between security points for accountability, support, and supervisory oversight.”
The department also said the operation “has well-established Rules for the Use of Force” and provides quarterly “refresher” trainings and reference cards for soldiers — but did not make these documents available when asked.
The Perfect Victims
When it comes to police brutality, migrants and asylum-seekers are in many ways ideal victims. They often depart from countries where police corruption is common, as is retribution for complaints against law enforcement. Some leave for the United States because they’ve been persecuted for things like their race, religion, nationality, politics or belonging to a particular social group — the very circumstances that would make them eligible for asylum in the United States.
Many encounter U.S. law enforcement only after a weeks- or months-long trek through Central America, including a trip through the infamously deadly Darien Gap. In Mexico, the kidnapping of migrants for ransom is extremely common, as is rape.
By the time people reach the U.S.-Mexico border, they’re often physically exhausted; carrying injuries, disease and trauma from their journey; wary of further encounters with law enforcement; and eager to reach their final destination within the United States.
“They just want to suck it up and go, they want to put it behind them — they’re on their way to their destination,” the border shelter medical director said. “They’re one stop from what’s over the rainbow.”
Referring to alleged abuse by Operation Lone Star soldiers, the medical director added, “It would be hard to discipline somebody if you don’t have a witness, or a victim.”
Many migrants “are fleeing corrupt governments where they have already tried filing a police report, and, as a consequence, they face retaliation,” said Pedro De Velasco, director of education and advocacy at Kino Border Initiative, or KBI, a humanitarian and policy advocacy group with locations in the United States and Mexico.
De Velasco and others with whom HuffPost spoke were quick to point out that federal Border Patrol and its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, have their own reputations for, among other things, the deaths of migrants in custody; alleged physical and sexual abuse; deplorable conditions in detention centers; the confiscation of medicine, documents and other significant items; and a culture of cruelty — as evidenced by the routine use of slurs and dehumanizing language by agents referring to people crossing the border.
One review found the accountability process at the federal level is mostly unresponsive. A report last year from KBI and WOLA that tracked dozens of complaints filed about alleged abuse by Border Patrol agents and Customs and Border Protection officers between 2020 and 2022 found that just 5% led to the referrals for disciplinary action or the issuance of recommendations.
“Most of the abuses go unreported,” De Velasco told HuffPost, noting the widespread lack of access to, or even knowledge of, the Department of Homeland Security civil rights complaint process. “Let’s imagine that, miraculously, someone is able to figure out how this process works and submits a complaint with enough information for DHS to do something about it. Most of the time, the answer they get is essentially, ‘We received your complaint, and we’ll keep it on file for future reference.’ And that’s it.”
Still, over the years, there have been reforms to Border Patrol and CBP practices, largely the result of local community activism — including a 1992 class-action lawsuit in which El Paso high school students sued Border Patrol over racial profiling. Changes to Border Patrol’s use of force policy in 2014 established that, among other things, “Authorized Officers/Agents should, whenever reasonable, avoid placing themselves in positions where they have no alternative to using deadly force.” Last year, CBP instituted new restrictions on vehicle pursuits near the border, which are often deadly.
In 2022, responding in part to pressure from activists, the Biden administration disbanded Border Patrol’s “critical incident teams” that until then had collected evidence related to so-called “critical” incidents, or those involving the use of deadly force, or resulting in serious injury or death. The teams had come under scrutiny due to a lack of transparency and independence from the agents they were investigating, and allegations that agents on the teams had tampered with evidence. CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility took over the investigations, and in May of this year, the Government Accountability Office found that a hiring surge had added dozens of new investigators to the office’s workforce and that the office had “made significant progress implementing investigative standards” — though concerns remained regarding “investigator independence.” Summaries of preliminary findings for some critical incidents are posted on a CBP “accountability and transparency” page.
“When you start a new agency doing this, especially in that shoot-from-the-hip, haphazard manner, with no clear mandate about what they’re actually trying to do, that’s a recipe for disaster.”
- Jeremy Slack, chair of the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso
Jeremy Slack, chair of the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, has surveyed migrants about their experience with federal immigration enforcement agents for 15 years. He told HuffPost that allegations of abuse against Border Patrol agents have in general trended downward in that time, due in part to the increase in asylum claims in recent years, which incentivize people to surrender to Border Patrol agents rather than trying to evade them.
“It used to be about 1 in 10 people would report physical abuse on the previous apprehension, and now it’s much lower,” he said. By contrast, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in 2021, and the program has no comparable history of reform. While Border Patrol agents often live in communities along the border, Texas National Guard soldiers sometimes arrive from daylong trips across the state — strangers both to border communities and the migrants crossing into them.
“Border Patrol is a known quantity, and people have been working on the issue of Border Patrol accountability for decades,” Slack said. “When you start a new agency doing this, especially in that shoot-from-the-hip, haphazard manner, with no clear mandate about what they’re actually trying to do, that’s a recipe for disaster.”
To use one example, Operation Lone Star — which in addition to soldiers also involves state troopers in about 60 participating counties, mostly near the border — has led to a ballooning number of risky vehicle chases in participating counties.
Last November, a lengthy report by Human Rights Watch counted 74 people killed and 189 injured as a result of pursuits by Texas state troopers, or local law enforcement, in Operation Lone Star counties, in the 29-month period between March 2021 and July 2023. The vast majority of the pursuits in Operation Lone Star counties began because of misdemeanor traffic violations, according to the report. It also found that out of all pursuits statewide by state troopers since March 2021, roughly 68% of them had taken place in Operation Lone Star counties, despite those counties representing just 13% of the state’s population. Innocent bystanders were among the chase victims, including children.
The same month the report was released, eight people — including both Americans and Hondurans — died in a head-on collision after Texas troopers gave chase to a white Honda Civic due to suspicion of human smuggling.
And when it came to soldiers along the border, Woodward said their actions appeared similarly unrestrained.
“I have not seen any oversight for how soldiers treat migrants,” he said.
It’s unclear if anyone in Operation Lone Star has been charged with a crime for their treatment of migrants — though a handful of soldiers have been charged with alleged smuggling.
And while the Texas Military Department and Texas Department of Public Safety have internal investigators, it’s not clear whether they’ve pursued, or even received, complaints from migrants regarding the behavior of soldiers or troopers acting as part of Operation Lone Star. The TMD and DPS inspector general’s offices both referred HuffPost to the formal records request process.
‘We Don’t Understand Why They Allow It’
Urgent questions about Operation Lone Star remain unanswered — such as what border-specific use-of-force training soldiers receive, or what legal authority soldiers are operating under when they take federal immigration enforcement into their own hands, despite being part of a state mission on federally administered land near the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
For years, Texas Civil Rights Project and other groups have called for the federal government to intervene, filing complaints calling for the Justice Department to investigate Operation Lone Star, alleging in April that “Texas systematically abuses migrants along the border.”
The United States has sued Texas over Senate Bill 4, the law that would make illegally crossing the border a state crime — and, therefore, allow state officials to enforce their own immigration law. SB 4 has been paused by a federal appeals court. The federal government has also sued Texas over parts of Operation Lone Star — for example, over Texas’ use of floating buoy barriers in the Rio Grande. An appeals court ruled in July that the barriers can stay for now. Another suit, against Texas’ use of concertina wire in a city park in Eagle Pass, is ongoing. In January, a narrow Supreme Court order allowed Border Patrol agents to cut or move razor wire in the area. But reams of razor wire remain. And while in 2022 the Texas Tribune reported emails indicating the Justice Department was probing claims of civil rights violations under Operation Lone Star, the federal government has never meaningfully challenged Abbott’s overall policy.
Woodward said the Justice Department acknowledged TCRP’s latest complaint and said they were looking into it, but hasn’t substantively responded. In contrast to other parts of Operation Lone Star — pursuing trespassing arrests on private property, or taking over the city park in Eagle Pass as a staging ground — Texas’ violent efforts to stop migrants from coming into the country happen on territory controlled by the U.S. government.
“This is all happening on federal land,” Woodward said. “CBP is watching it all day from surveillance towers. They know this is happening. We don’t understand why they allow it to continue.”
“Really, you have to go back to Kent State” to find something similar to Operation Lone Star’s use of force on American soil, Adam Isacson, director of WOLA’s defense oversight program, said on a call in August organized by the Border Network for Human Rights, referring to the infamous 1970 incident in which the Ohio National Guard opened fire on anti-war demonstrators on the campus of Kent State University, killing four unarmed students and injuring nine others.
A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment.
If anything, Biden has sought to tamp down on the issue of border crossings during election season, instituting dramatic restrictions on people seeking asylum after crossing the border without authorization. Such asylum requests have been legally allowed for decades. Now, the administration has cut off that avenue except in certain cases, such as human trafficking victims, and faces lawsuits from the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy groups.
As a result, advocates worry migrants crossing the border are now trying to avoid both Texas soldiers and federal immigration enforcement, leading them to deadlier, more isolated areas along the border.
“Unlawful border crossings have dropped by more than 55 percent since the June proclamation and rule went into effect, which means fewer migrants are putting their lives and savings in the hands of criminal smugglers,” a DHS spokesperson, Luis Miranda, told HuffPost in a statement, referring to Biden’s restrictions on asylum-seekers who’ve entered the United States between ports of entry.
“Criminal smugglers are responsible for placing migrants in harm’s way, and we continue to work with partners throughout the hemisphere to bring them to justice. At the same time, we have significantly expanded lawful pathways and orderly processes, which are providing alternatives to irregular migration for those with protection claims. We urge state and local law enforcement partners to coordinate in a way that respects the federal authority of enforcing immigration laws, keeps our communities safe, and treats human beings with dignity,” the statement continued.
Without more federal oversight — and with few apparent restrictions from Texas’ military or political leadership — Operation Lone Star’s soldiers have in some ways been left to their own devices along the border.
“There are lots of discrepancies, lots of questions, and things that are more than likely not being reported at all, or just aren’t being reported properly,” Mike said.
“Lots of questions need answers. And, probably, a lot of things won’t get answered.”
