AUSTIN — Jerald Perkins was leaving work in a West Texas oil field when he saw the telltale blue lights in the rearview mirror. The state trooper pulled him over for lingering too long in the fast lane. Perkins told the officer about two blunts in the car and braced for the worst. But the trooper simply wrote Perkins a citation and sent him on his way, according to the officer’s report.
The traffic stop some 150 miles from Mexico had no clear link to cross-border crime. Perkins is a U.S. citizen. And the amount of drugs involved was tiny.
Yet the incident in February was credited to Operation Lone Star, the state’s multibillion-dollar push to secure the border with Mexico. It’s not an outlier.
Gov. Greg Abbott points to the more than 14,000 criminal arrests as proof his border mission is cracking down on drug smugglers and human traffickers. But mixed into the statistics are Texans caught with small amounts of marijuana during routine traffic stops nowhere near the border, according to an analysis by The Dallas Morning News.
Roughly one out of every five of the operation’s arrests has been a low-level marijuana charge that would trigger only a ticket, or less, in some of the state’s biggest cities. Fewer than 100 people have been busted with more than 5 pounds of the drug, according to arrest records The News obtained through an open records request from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The department did not say how it determines which arrests are attributed to the operation that has flooded the border with state troopers and Texas National Guard members. Critics say Abbott is touting inflated numbers to look tough on immigration in an election year.
The state’s GOP leaders have pointed to a spike in illegal immigration as justification to pump nearly $4 billion into the border security mission.
Quality data is critical for leaders to make informed decisions about how to use those taxpayer-funded resources, said Victor Manjarrez Jr., a former border patrol chief who now teaches at the University of Texas at El Paso. He questioned the inclusion of low-level marijuana charges that lack a nexus with the border.
“No one would ever say that it’s a cartel smuggling 2 ounces at a time,” Manjarrez said.
Abbott, who has made border security a centerpiece of his campaign, is running for a third term in November. Since he launched the immigration dragnet in March 2021, the mission has expanded in cost and scope, yet the central focus has remained combating drug and human smuggling at the U.S.-Mexico border.
But the Department of Public Safety said it considers the operation to cover a wide range of 63 counties that stretch far from the border into West Texas and up the Gulf Coast. Counties across Texas are also included when there’s “a seizure or arrest that has a border nexus,” department spokesperson Ericka Miller said. The department did not explain further.
Arrests in counties that are home to Midland, San Angelo and Corpus Christi — all more than a two-hours drive from Mexico — account for hundreds of border operation arrests. The most common offense is low-level pot possession.
They include a 71-year-old Vietnam veteran pulled over in Pecos County for tinted windows and ticketed after an officer found a “green leafy substance,” as well as a San Angelo cosmetologist stopped for speeding in the West Texas city and arrested for a “marihuana cigarette in the ash tray,” according to DPS reports and public records.
Both were cited for possessing less than 2 ounces of marijuana. The department did not answer questions about how such cases aligned with Operation Lone Star.
“It seems like a trap,” said Perkins, who lives in Houston and is trying to hire a lawyer to handle the case in court.
The Department of Public Safety has faced scrutiny for its border metrics before. In 2019, a legislative committee that conducts state agency performance evaluations noted that the DPS was not providing “sufficient information to the public and policymakers about the return on investment for border security funds.”
Rep. James White, a Hillister Republican who chairs a House homeland security committee, said arrests attributed to the operation should have a connection to the border. For example, he would expect cartel members caught with small amounts of marijuana to be included in the count.
“If they have no nexus to the mission, those metrics really shouldn’t be in the data pool,” White said.
But arrest records provided by the DPS make it hard to tell. Immigration status, potential gang affiliations and criminal histories are not identified. The department did not respond to questions about the number of U.S. citizens arrested under the operation.
“Our personnel have stopped gang members, human traffickers, sex offenders and many others from coming into our country illegally. Had we not been there, all of it likely would have crossed into the country unimpeded,” Miller, the DPS spokesperson, said in a statement. “The state of Texas is sending a message to anyone who is thinking of crossing into our country illegally to think again.”
Statewide, the majority of arrests attributed to Operation Lone Star have been for criminal trespassing. But they are primarily concentrated in rural Kinney County, which borders Mexico and where officials have been aggressively enforcing a controversial initiative to arrest and jail migrants caught on private property.
In 10 other border-area counties, including Dimmit, Zavala and Uvalde, suspected human smuggling accounts for the most arrests related to the state’s border mission, according to DPS data that runs through April.
In the Rio Grande Valley, a collection of South Texas counties that make up the state’s busiest immigration corridor, low-level marijuana possession is the most common arrest under Operation Lone Star, records show. The same is true in El Paso County and Webb County, where the city of Laredo is located.
Rep. Alex Dominguez, a Brownsville Democrat, criticized the operation as doing little.
“There are more troopers on the road here, forcing people to drive a little bit slower,” he said. “It is nothing but a political showpiece by the governor to try to show his strong-on-border security stance in hopes of him getting reelected.”
In a statement, Abbott’s office defended the operation, saying it has resulted in the seizure of deadly drugs such as fentanyl and produced thousands of criminal arrests.
“Texas has and continues ramping up every available strategy and resource in response to President Biden’s ongoing border crisis to protect our state and our nation,” spokesman Renae Eze said.
