The main street in Amerika Garcia Grewal’s town looks like a war zone. She lives in Eagle Pass, Texas, a city nestled on the Rio Grande River and a natural border with Mexico. Last year, thousands of Texas National Guard troops arrived in town, bringing drones, guns, Humvees and concertina wire, including the coils now lining the heavily patrolled Main Street.
A string of massive shipping containers now walls off that same street, and elsewhere in the city, work is underway on an 80-acre military base. This buildup is part of the Texas government’s Operation Lone Star, an $11 billion effort to carry out mass arrests — often for criminal trespassing — and bus immigrants to Democrat-led cities, all in the name of border security.
Some residents have welcomed the increase in military presence, but others, like Garcia Grewal, have a different view. Operation Lone Star has been an unwelcome incursion in her town, she says, as well as a windfall for private contractors who’ve helped line the Rio Grande with water buoys.
“I don’t know how much more will change for us,” she explained, “but I think we’ll see more parts of the US start to look like us.”
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Texas Governor Greg Abbott credits his operation for a decrease in encounters with immigrants at the border, but experts point out there are many reasons for such a decrease. What’s more, researchers and rights groups show that the operation is the source of catastrophic harm, including hundreds of injuries, a record number of immigrant deaths in the county housing Eagle Pass, and “troubling” patterns of abuse by law enforcement and the National Guard.
And even though arrests have indeed gone up (as the plan intended), veteran attorney Kristen Etter, for instance, recently told the Associated Press that many of the over 3,000 immigrants she represented as of late 2023 were ultimately able to stay in the US and seek asylum.
Melissa del Bosque, a journalist who has covered the border for nearly three decades, told Inkstick that it doesn’t matter to the governor and his allies if crossings or encounters go down.
“They’ll just keep messaging on their propaganda ecosystem that we are under threat, that we are under invasion, and that these tactics need to be taken,” she said. “It’s about pushing the limits of the rule of law and the constitution, and it’s about pushing the military into doing domestic and civilian-type enforcement.”
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In 1981, the El Paso Herald-Post reported that border checks had a new motive: catch a Libyan hit squad en route to the US. The New York Times said the same thing. According to the paper, US Border Patrol was on the hunt for “assassination squads from Libya,” including a cell overseen by the infamous Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a Venezuelan who participated in left-wing bombings and assassinations under the nom de guerre “Carlos the Jackal.”
No hard evidence of these hit squads ever surfaced, but it didn’t matter. As Democrat Beto O’Rourke told The Economist in 2014, “Whatever the threat of the day is, we tend to project it onto the border.”
In the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, when del Bosque was covering the Texas legislature, a baseless rumor seemed to pop up every now and then: Qurans and prayer rugs were turning up in the borderlands, proof that the US needed stronger security.
It’s about pushing the limits of the rule of law and the constitution, and it’s about pushing the military into doing domestic and civilian-type enforcement.
Del Bosque points out that former Texas Governor Rick Perry is responsible for enhancing the right-wing “ecosystem” that now runs nonstop coverage of a so-called invasion at the border. He cultivated close ties with outlets like Breitbart, and he invited Fox News on a flyover of the border. “There are few things the federal government is supposed to be good at,” Perry told anchor Greta van Susteren. “Security is one of them.”
“[Perry] started creating this sort of militarized vision of the border for political purposes and the media,” del Bosque explained. “There was this growth of this media ecosystem that really supported that. And so, when Abbott took over, that was already kind of in place.”
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Like Perry, Governor Greg Abbott originally endorsed Ted Cruz during the presidential primaries of 2016. When he switched his endorsement to Trump, an advisor explained the endorsement as a way of furthering Abbott’s goals and brand. That brand continues drifting rightward, thanks in part to Trump allies like Ken Cuccinelli, who criticized Abbott’s border security measures and pressured him to “declare an invasion.” Abbott eventually did so, and he and Trump are now close allies. The governor’s supporters and critics alike consider Operation Lone Star a source of great inspiration for Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda — an agenda that, most recently, has amounted to mass arrests and transportation across borders without due process.
Historically, immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government. But according to Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, Operation Lone Star “sort of toed the line in a lot of ways,” making legal challenges more difficult.
For instance, those National Guardsmen stationed in Eagle Pass “weren’t necessarily doing or carrying out immigration enforcement,” she notes, adding: “They were simply notifying Customs and Border Protection of people who had tried to cross, or they were carrying out arrests for trespassing.”
In this way, the operation paved the way for the current collaborations between Abbott, Trump, and Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar.” Shortly after the November election, Homan and Abbott appeared on Fox News together, discussing their joint plans to “restore order” at the border. Of late, that has amounted to mass arrests and transportation across borders without due process. More recently, Homan spoke at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, encouraging contractors and private companies to partner with federal agencies as he seeks to increase immigration arrests.
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In Texas, Homan’s recent work includes raids on communities like Colony Ridge in Houston, where sweeping arrests rounded up more than 100 immigrants, ensnaring them in costly legal proceedings and landing many in ICE custody for a month. The federal government wants to open more detention facilities in Texas, and when asking Congress to reimburse Texas for Operation Lone Star, Abbott offered to sell the government some of the land along the border.
In fact, the Trump administration reportedly informed the heads of four federal departments last week that the US military would take control of federal lands on the country’s border with Mexico.
To date, the operation has racked up a bill of more than $11 billion in taxpayer money, with millions going to an Arizona-based organization called Mayhem Solutions Group. Members of the group, commonly referred to as MSG, appeared in photographs with Homan at Mar-a-Lago in late 2024. According to a bus driver contacted by MSG, the group transported immigrants in buses where the conditions were “disgusting and inhuman.”
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Priscilla Olivarez, an attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, said that migrants are facing serious harms for seeking safety. “And not only migrants, but we’ve also witnessed US citizens, community members with significant ties in our communities be harmed by this OLS scheme.”
Specifically, she points to a scathing Human Rights Watch report that shows high-speed pursuits have killed 106 people as part of Operation Lone Star actions, with hundreds more enduring injuries. This damage is irreversible, Olivarez emphasizes — but why continue the same program at risk to more people?
“Now that the Trump administration has said that they are going to devote a lot of resources to criminalize our community members and harm asylum seekers, which is what Operation Lone Star was doing, it does make one wonder, ‘Okay, then why is Operation Lone Star needed? Why is that waste continuing in our Texas legislative session currently?’”
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Abbott has signaled a willingness to wind down the program now that Trump is in the White House. Yet, several bills up for debate in this year’s legislative session could further the legacy of Abbott’s operation, which he has recently called a “border security blueprint.”
One bill proposes a new Border Protection Unit; another would mandate counties with more than 100,000 residents to participate in the currently voluntary 287(g) program, through which sheriffs effectively become deputies of ICE. Agreements like this are becoming increasingly popular outside of Texas, too, including in Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. On April 8, five sheriff’s offices in Minnesota signed up to work with ICE.
For instance, one such program is the so-called “task force model” which ended in 2012 amid rampant racial profiling; the Trump administration recently revived it. Under these task force agreements, local law enforcement can question people about their immigration status and even arrest them for the ultimate goal of deportation.
Del Bosque sees parallels between these steps and the work of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “It’s really about crossing lines and creating more power for a singular leader: in this case, Trump who wants to be King of America.”
She added: “What I always say is that what’s happening at the border really has nothing to do with the border. Rather, she argued, it’s about the country’s interior. “It’s about Washington DC. It’s about democracy and rule of law. And what Trump is trying to do is get rid of the rule of law and due process so that everything is consolidated under his authority.”
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Putzel-Kavanaugh is one of the experts who say Operation Lone Star should not get sole credit for the drop in border encounters. As she explains it, Mexico “stepped up” its own National Guard numbers in the north, making it more difficult for people to reach the border with the US.
Then, in 2024, the Biden administration restricted asylum access to people who made requests via the CBP One app, leading to a further decrease in encounters. The Trump administration later shuttered the app, and Putzel-Kavanuagh says “asylum is virtually inaccessible at the border right now.”
“It’s possible that encounters could go back up again,” she added. “A lot of the actions may be an attempt to deter that from happening, but I think that there’s really a mismatch there in the actions being taken to militarize the border and the reality on the ground, being that there just aren’t that many encounters happening on a daily basis. And so, does the action match the reality?”
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That’s not the only mismatch happening. What would a logical and humane border policy would look like? Putzel-Kavanaugh said such a policy requires “resourcing the whole immigration system and understanding that migration management cannot happen exclusively at the US-Mexico border.”
“For decades, there has been a mismatch in resourcing, with enforcement agencies receiving much more funding than the Executive Office of Immigration Review and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, both agencies which are now facing massive and growing backlogs,” she continued. The more regional and global migration becomes, she added, the more obvious it is that the “US-Mexico border alone is ill-equipped to manage migration.” In her words, “It requires working with other countries in the region and beyond to develop mechanisms for safe, orderly and regular migration.”
Del Bosque adds that further investments in border journalism would help combat this “mismatch with reality.” That’s why she founded The Border Chronicle, and she wants people to read and support the vital reportage still happening at the border.
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The Monitor in McAllen is one such paper. Recently, they published the story of the Hernandez-Garcia family (not their real last name), whom Border Patrol stopped at a checkpoint in the Rio Grande Valley while rushing to a hospital for their 10-year-old daughter. The young girl recently had a brain tumor, and they’d made similar trips to the hospital in the past.
The parents, Juan and Maria, were not born in the US, but in their car, they held the US birth certificates for their daughter and four of her five siblings. They also had a letter from their immigration lawyer, which explained that Juan and Maria were in the middle of the visa application process. Still, the family faced a choice: release the kids into foster care, or accept deportation to Mexico as a family. They chose the latter. According to the Monitor, the family is now in Mexico, “where they live in fear of cartel violence and worry about how to get their daughter the treatment she needs.”
Stories like this are similar to the grievances Olivarez, the attorney, often hears from clients and friends in Texas cities like Eagle Pass and Laredo.
“We talk to them about their medical needs, about the need for more clean, safe drinking water,” she said. “These are basic necessities that are being overlooked while we’re spending all this money on militarizing the border.”
Earlier this month, the National Guard in Eagle Pass reduced their foothold in Shelby Park, reopening the public space for citizens. A host of shipping containers still guard the nearby river, which is rimmed with concertina wire. Garcia Grewal says they’ve left behind torn-up fields and damaged irrigation systems. A park that was once humming with activity is now heavily damaged, and residents are unsure when, or if, it will return to its former state.
“This is not security,” she says. “It’s an assault on our way of life.”
