Over the past two years, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers have engaged in almost daily dangerous high speed pursuits through El Paso, usually chasing suggested migrant smugglers, the El Paso County Attorney’s Office said in a report to be presented to Commissioners Court on Monday.
“We did find that there is an ongoing problem with the way DPS is doing these pursuits. We do think that they are a danger to El Pasoans and that they have become more frequent. It’s become more of a problem after the implementation of Operation Lone Star,” said Bernardo Cruz, the assistant county attorney who led the research behind the project, which included open records requests to DPS and reviewing court records.
“We’re not saying that there is no room for pursuits at all. We recognize it’s a tool for law enforcement. Within that, we just think the way it’s being done by a DPS is a problem,” Cruz said in an interview with El Paso Matters and KTEP News ahead of the presentation.
DPS’ data showed that its troopers – who face fewer chase restrictions than other law-enforcement officers in the region – were responsible for 97% of all high-speed pursuits in El Paso County since 2018, the County Attorney’s Office said. Almost half the DPS pursuits reached speeds of more than 100 mph, and many go through sensitive areas such as neighborhoods, schools and churches.
DPS officials in Austin didn’t respond to a request from El Paso Matters for comment on the criticisms from the County Attorney’s Office.
The County Attorney’s Office was unable to identify the total number of injuries or deaths in DPS pursuits, but said media reports show that they have frequently occurred.
Two migrants were killed in October 2023 when the driver smuggling them crashed while being pursued by DPS.
On Oct. 4, 2024, Wendy J. Rodriguez, 44, was killed when a suspected 17-year-old migrant smuggler being chased by DPS slammed into her vehicle at the intersection of Upper Valley and Artcraft roads near the New Mexico-Texas state line.
The deaths highlight the danger of high speed pursuits, Cruz and County Attorney Christina Sanchez said.
Many of the pursuits involve people who pick up migrants in New Mexico and then are intercepted by Texas DPS troopers when they cross the state line, the report from the County Attorney’s Office said.
The data compiled by the County Attorney’s Office shows DPS pursuits in El Paso County have increased almost seven-fold since 2023, when DPS expanded its presence as part of Operation Lone Star, Gov. Greg Abbott’s initiative to use state resources to enforce federal immigration laws. The increased DPS presence began after the city of El Paso issued a disaster declaration in December 2022, during a surge in migrants crossing the border.
The number of unauthorized border crossings plunged starting in January 2024, but the DPS pursuits continued at high levels, Cruz said.
Sanchez said her office is trying to raise public awareness of the impact of the pursuits in El Paso, with hopes that DPS might revisit its policies.
“I think that this is the deepest dive that any governmental entity has done to look at this issue, to spend the time and the resources to review this, to see what it means,” she said.
High-speed pursuit policies
The Police Executive Research Forum, a leading law enforcement research and policy organization, issued a report in 2023 through the U.S. Justice Department that recommended that police develop strict policies controlling when officers can engage in high-speed pursuits of suspects. Such pursuits are inherently dangerous and should be done sparingly, the report said.
“We recommend that pursuits should take place only when two very specific standards are met: (1) A violent crime has been committed and (2) the suspect poses an imminent threat to commit another violent crime. If those two conditions are not met, agencies need to look for alternatives to accomplish the same objective. You can get a suspect another day, but you can’t get a life back. We believe policy, training, and supervision should all support the core value of policing: the sanctity of human life,” the report said.
The County Attorney’s Office hired Shaw Drake, a former attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, to review the DPS pursuit policy and compare it to those of other law-enforcement organizations.
“The DPS vehicle pursuit policy is wholly inadequate for protecting public safety and is out of line with vehicle pursuit best practices across the board,” Drake said in an interview with El Paso Matters.
The El Paso police and sheriff’s departments, as well as the Border Patrol, have much more restrictive pursuit policies that prioritize public safety, Drake said.
The DPS policy “really provides DPS with a wide range of ability to initiate a pursuit on the basis of very little information and then continue that pursuit in a dangerous fashion without restricting officers’ ability to conduct pursuits in places like high traffic areas or near school zones or anything like that, areas that would warrant an additional level of consideration for the protection of public safety,” he said.
While with the ACLU, Drake worked on efforts to get Customs and Border Protection agencies, including the Border Patrol, to modify pursuit policies after numerous pursuits ended in crashes with deaths and injuries. CBP adopted a new policy in 2023 that largely aligns with PERF recommendations.
The DPS pursuit policy is similar to the one used by CBP prior to 2023, Drake said.
“Border Patrol understood the importance of having a policy that appropriately balanced public safety and their law enforcement mission and understood that there are alternative mechanisms for conducting their law enforcement mission and effectuating an arrest at the end of the day,” he said.
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