In 2021, Governor Greg Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, deploying the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety to the southern border to contain immigration at its southern border.
However, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) presented a report revealing that The Government of Texas has invested more than 11 billion dollars in a “discriminatory” policy on its southern border.
The report ensures that Operation Lone Star has served mainly to “single out people in a discriminatory manner based on their ethnic or racial origin” and to arrest those who “do not pose a threat to public safety and then force them into a separate and unequal penal system.”
The program was created by Republican Governor Greg Abbott in March 2021 just weeks before President Joe Biden took office.
The priorities of the program, as detailed by the Texas government, are to prevent the entry of migrants, arrest human traffickers and members of criminal gangs, and stop the entry of drugs into the United States.
“Lone Star” has been responsible for the militarization of some border areas, sending thousands of National Guard troops. In turn, the program instructs state authorities to prosecute the passage of migrants through private property as a misdemeanor.
The ACLU report denounces that the majority of arrests (75%) that authorities made between 2021 and 2023 under “Operation Lone Star” were for irregular entries and not for human, drug or weapons trafficking.
Despite this, Governor Abbott has justified his strategy by saying that “President Biden’s reckless open border policies have created an ongoing crisis at our southern border as unprecedented levels of illegal immigrants and deadly drugs pour into the country. Texas”,
While, The ACLU found that more than 96% of people who were arrested between 2021 and 2023 for trespassing were Latin American.
The report also revealed that The scope of Abbott’s project goes far beyond the southern border, as some 13,600 arrests took place in counties that do not border Mexico. and in some cases “hundreds of kilometers away” from ports of entry.
“Texas has no business trying to run its own immigration enforcement program,” said Sarah Cruz, policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU, “Operation Lone Star is unconstitutional and ineffective.”
Abbott’s anti-immigrant policies have pitted the state government against the federal government and have turned the border area into a “political theater,” according to some residents.
Beyond the government confrontations, “Lone Star” has endangered “the safety and lives” of migrants and border residentsaccording to the organization Human Rights Watch.
In January of this year, a woman and three children drowned in the Rio Grande River, in the border city of Eagle Pass, days after state authorities took control of the area to prevent migrants from touching US soil.
After a record increase in the number of apprehensions at the southern border last year, the arrival of people to US territory has decreased in recent months.
Experts and Biden Government officials attribute this drop, unusual for the time of year, to the measures taken by Mexico to control the movement of people to the south.
*With information from EFE
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