Texas Spent Billions on Border Security. It's Not Working.
(snip)
Operation Lone Star, a top priority of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, has inundated the U.S.-Mexico border with thousands of Texas state troopers and National Guardsmen, started work on a state-controlled border wall and built a new skeleton justice system with its own courts, judges and jails to lodge misdemeanor state trespassing charges against migrants. The program is an explicit challenge to the national government, which by law controls international borders and immigration enforcement.
This week, the program was in the public eye for reports of inhumane treatment of migrants. In a July 3 email, reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, a trooper and medic raised concerns to his superiors, saying troopers and Guard members on the operation were instructed to push a nursing mother back into the river, to deny water to migrants even in extreme heat and to block a 4-year-old who was trying to cross coils of razor wire, from reaching shore. The email, earlier reported by the Houston Chronicle, detailed instances of injury that included a pregnant woman entangled in the wire having a miscarriage and numerous severe lacerations.
The program’s efficacy is also under question. The area of the border most heavily targeted by Operation Lone Star has seen the most rapid increases in illegal border crossings in the state since the operation began. Thousands of arrests by state troopers under the program have been unrelated to border security, and instead netted U.S. citizens hundreds of miles from the border. Arrests of migrants trespassing on private property have generally not affected their immigration cases, and courts have found many of the arrests made in the first two years to be discriminatory and invalidated them.
Despite the flood of resources, the added arrests by Operation Lone Star personnel in that section of the border amount to about 1% of the encounters there by Border Patrol in the same time frame, or about 11,000 added to the Border Patrol’s 850,000. Still, with more than $9.5 billion spent and allocated through 2025, Texas is doubling down on its strategy.
More (a lot more)
https://archive.is/EdUf6
= new reply since forum marked as read
