Across the nation, many police departments have restricted high-speed pursuits, because they often have deadly consequences. But Texas’ Department of Public Safety has expanded the practice as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, endangering border communities.
A new report by Human Rights Watch finds that at least 74 people were killed and another 189 injured in high-speed pursuits from March 2021, when Operation Lone Star began, to July 2023. As the report notes, that’s a rate of nearly three deaths and seven injuries per month, significantly higher than the nearly two deaths per month before the initiative started.
Operation Lone Star is a multibillion-dollar program to detain migrants and asylum seekers and charge them with state trespassing charges. Abbott, who recently endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, has relentlessly pushed the racist narrative that the border is under invasion. And if cash-starved rural and border counties are to qualify for funding under Operation Lone Star, elected officials must declare a disaster due to migration. This bolsters the invasion narrative promoted by Trump, Abbott, and other MAGA politicians, which has led National Guard troops and DPS troopers to be deployed in border communities.
Border residents have suffered. When looking at the entire state, 68 percent of deadly high-speed pursuits from March 2021 to July 2023 were in the 60 counties where Operation Lone Star operates. “This means … these residents are experiencing a disproportionate share of vehicle pursuits across the state,” the report notes. The Border Chronicle spoke with two of the report’s authors, Bob Libal, in Austin, Texas, and Norma Herrera, who lives in Pharr, a Texas border community where Operation Lone Star has been rolled out.
You live in the Rio Grande Valley. What kind of impact have you seen from these DPS pursuits in your community?
Norma: As far back as two years ago, I noticed this uptick in local [media] reports of pursuits that lead to crashes, deaths, and injuries. While working on the report, I spoke with Norma Saldaña, who has a supply chain business outside of Edinburg. There was this horrific crash, and the vehicle hit her fence. There were migrants in the trunk of the vehicle. Bodies basically flew everywhere. It was a very bloody incident and resulted in the death of the driver. Another woman I spoke to in neighboring Starr County, a vehicle at high speed crashed into her property, which took out the solar panel system she had just installed. It was especially traumatic because this happened in the early-morning hours when the school bus was picking up children on their street. She said if it had happened seconds earlier, the car might have hit the school bus and killed children. It was very shocking for her and her neighbors.
I was driving in the Rio Grande Valley recently, and what really struck me was just how intense the traffic is now and how congested it is. It’s a huge metropolitan area with a lot of traffic. Expressway 83 is constantly under construction. It just seems incredibly dangerous to try to do any kind of high-speed pursuit in that environment.
Norma: The report doesn’t dive into this, but one thing I noticed is that it does seem like there is a higher rate of collisions, injuries, and deaths in the more populated cities. That’s especially true in El Paso, because ever since the troopers were deployed there, there’s been this dramatic increase. El Paso is an even bigger region than the [Rio Grande] Valley. And so, I wonder if the incidence of these pursuits in these crashes and deaths are higher. I mean, it seems logical, right?
If these dangerous pursuits were happening in Houston, or Dallas, they would probably get a lot more coverage and attention.
Norma: The border is treated as this throwaway zone. Because it’s the border and people think of the border as this place where enforcement needs to happen to stop people from coming into the area. And it’s like the residents that live here, and any sort of consequences that they suffer from this very overzealous enforcement, don’t matter.
Did you get to talk to any local law enforcement or state law enforcement? How does Operation Lone Star pressure them into doing these high-speed pursuits? And is it just DPS or also local law enforcement participating?
Norma: One local law enforcement official told me that they’re under a lot of pressure politically from the top Texas leadership to be patrolling in an aggressive way and chasing after any vehicle they suspect has a migrant. In contrast, he said, many cities and counties, not just in Texas but across the country, are reforming their policies and only allowing pursuits when there’s the threat of a violent offense or an imminent danger to the public. So, he was able to clarify for us that DPS really is an outlier in terms of this national trend. And that political pressure is getting in the way of good policing and good judgment.
Which law enforcement participate in these pursuits depends on the specific area. There are regions like Kinney County, where the local law enforcement is super gung ho about it and partnering with the state. The pursuits often involve more than one law enforcement agency. DPS is obviously the most aggressive one. They’re universally recognized by everybody we talked to as being the most aggressive agency.
Some years ago, I wrote about DPS shooting out the tires of cars from helicopters during pursuits at the border, which is just incredibly dangerous and reckless. And it did result in deaths. Why does DPS keep engaging in reckless behavior at the border?
Bob: It’s an agency that has been deployed for very specific political purposes. Steve McCraw, the head of DPS, didn’t respond to our report, but he did send a statement to the New York Times that “we’re not going to capitulate to the cartels.” Which doesn’t make any sense.
The people smuggling folks are overwhelmingly young Texans who are recruited on social media. These are not high-level cartel members. These are usually very young Texans—the average median age is like 26—which we discovered from looking at the data we received from federal public defenders. People would just reach out to them and offer them money to go drive somebody from the border, sometimes not even articulating that this was about immigration at all.
And then the idea that it makes us safer to chase people at 120 miles an hour down Texas highways makes no sense. Right. But it’s very indicative of DPS. And McCraw’s response to criticism on this [is] to double down on the political part of it and escape any sort of real accountability.
When I was writing about DPS shooting from helicopters during pursuits, I discovered that they hadn’t told local communities they were going to do this. Instead, they debuted it on a cable TV show called Texas Border Wars. In the report, you mention how these vehicle pursuits are used as propaganda in a media ecosystem that portrays the border as a war zone.
Bob: DPS and certainly the governor’s office like to use an array of data points, including the vehicle pursuits, to paint an image of the border as a place where there is chaos and violence that is driven by migrants. And where the solution is always more law enforcement, more militarization of the border. And what our report shows is that far from creating a more orderly, safer migration system, Operation Lone Star, through these vehicle pursuits, but also through the razor wire and pushing people back into the river, creates a more chaotic, dangerous migration system that harms both migrants and U.S. citizens, particularly border residents.
Also, in all these areas where Texas has deployed Operation Lone Star, migrants are still coming. So if the goal is to deter unauthorized migration, it has not been successful, but it has very much increased the number of deaths. So there’s a part of me that is, like, is there ever any accountability? Or is it just like, as long as we can continue to paint a picture of chaos, then we can continue to justify any sort of intervention?
Is there anything that truly surprised you while working on this report?
Bob: What is shocking to me is that DPS and local law enforcement can continue to get away with this kind of reckless behavior on a daily basis without there being meaningful oversight from the state of Texas or the federal government.
And the federal government is also funding some of this, right? I don’t think most people realize this.
Bob: Operation Lone Star would not be able to continue without federal agency collaboration and funding. Congressman [Joaquin] Castro and Congressman [Greg] Casar introduced an amendment to the 2024 homeland security funding bill that would cut federal funding to Operation Lone Star. That’s been one of the main priorities for advocacy groups, is for the federal government to stop funding these agencies if they continue to violate civil rights. Another priority is for the federal government to send civil rights monitors to the border. We’re way overdue for that. We should have people there monitoring what is happening because it’s clearly very troubling.
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