(The Center Square) – Five years into Texas’ border security mission, Operation Lone Star, law enforcement officials argue continued funding is critical for ongoing operations and they can’t do their jobs without it. But funding for jail expenses and transportation is drying up.
Although illegal border crossings have dropped by 95% in the first year of the Trump administration, OLS 2.0 is ongoing, with OLS officers targeting transnational crime.
While OLS officers have made a record number of arrests, the most challenging part lies ahead: finding the criminal foreign nationals in the United States and in Texas, dismantling transnational criminal operations, and prosecutions the offenders.
“Just because the bodies quit coming, we still have this massive cleanup to do,” Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe told The Center Square. “We still need funding for jail facilities and transportation.”
For state lawmakers who think “the border crisis is over,” Coe says, “they did not consider the cleanup. The governor’s grant office has said there’s no more funding for housing and transportation costs for OLS apprehensions. I had to let three OLS deputies go and take their salaries to pay the jail costs that the state isn’t paying for.”
OLS funding for both has dried up and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice stopped housing OLS prisoners, he said. TDCJ is also not participating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) program.
Because of bond reform being implemented in counties statewide, “all of the jails are starting to fill up,” Coe said. Kinney County doesn’t have a fulltime jail; not all counties have jails or they are very small. As a result, county sheriffs reach agreements to share housing prisoners. Kinney County would need $1 million to transport and pay other county jails to house everyone with outstanding warrants to prosecute them, Coe says.
“We’re in a rock and a hard place,” Coe said. “We still have to take illegal aliens to be processed, which shows that we're still doing the job. It’s been a headache and a nightmare.”
Since 2021, when OLS started, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith’s office has prosecuted roughly 5,000 people for criminal trespass and evading arrest, achieving a 90% conviction rate.
“Many people overlook the fact that successful prosecutions are more important than arrest numbers in achieving justice and creating a deterrence for those who commit crimes,” Smith told The Center Square. “The underlying reason why millions of illegal aliens invaded our country during the Biden administration is quite simple: people do not follow laws unless they are enforced.
“The only reason most people obey the law is the deterrence of punishment that results when it is violated. This is the fundamental basis of our legal system,” he said. “Governor Greg Abbott recognized the importance of this deterrence, which allowed Kinney County to beef up our criminal justice system with Operation Lone Star grant funding. This deterrence was successfully established in the county during the invasion we were subjected to.”
Kinney County was the first of 60 counties to issue a disaster declaration citing the border crisis. It was one of three counties that first declared an invasion. Over time, 55 counties declared an invasion, The Center Square exclusively reported.
“In 2021, thousands of illegal aliens chose to use privately owned ranches in Kinney County as a travel corridor after unlawfully entering the United States, resulting in 2,034 arrests. By aggressively prosecuting those individuals who chose to commit their crime in Kinney County, the arrest numbers began to plummet, with only 253 arrests in 2024,” Smith said. “State and federal law enforcement confirmed that human smugglers began actively avoiding Kinney County, opting to take much longer routes to avoid prosecution.”
The county’s OLS mission continues with 1,600 active warrants still pending prosecution.
Prosecutions are important for law and order and border security but “it's really about bringing justice to the landowners who want to see this through,” Coe said. “Landowners pay property taxes. They’ve suffered damages to their property and been the victims of other crimes and the perpetrators need to be prosecuted.”
OLS officers in Kinney County have arrested thousands of noncitizens and U.S. citizens coming from multiple states. Those with misdemeanor charges are released and ordered to return to their court date. If they don’t return, the county can’t pay to pick them up. County taxpayers are responsible for transportation and jail costs.
Normally, they’d “bring people in to face these charges and now we can't. If they're out of state, they're pretty much free to go,” Coe said. “That's because we don't have the money for jail housing and transportation.”
Warrants are also geographically limited, stating in-county or in-state only. Meaning, the county doesn’t have the funds to transport wanted criminals in Houston, San Antonio or Dallas let alone another state. If someone is arrested in Texas, Kinney County’s misdemeanor warrants will show up but “there's nothing they can do about it” because there’s no funding to pick them up, Coe said.
If someone is arrested in another state with a felony warrant out of Kinney County, it will show up in the NCIC with a note stating in-state pickup only, not extraditable. Limited funds exist for felony warrants, depending on the location and severity of the crime, he said.
Without TDCJ support or additional OLS funds, “We're going to have to make cuts across the board,” Coe said, and sustained interdiction efforts won’t be possible.
