Texas’ border jurisdictions are scrambling to manage thousands of pending Operation Lone Star cases after key state partners abruptly pulled out, leaving local officials to coordinate housing and transportation for defendants.
Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith told Texas Scorecard the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and the Texas Division of Emergency Management (TDEM), both of which helped provide housing for illegal crossers arrested under the border security initiative, are no longer handling those responsibilities.
The Del Rio Processing Center is reportedly shutting down, along with Val Verde County’s detention facility—the original epicenter of Operation Lone Star (OLS) prosecutions.
“We’re left holding the bag,” Smith said. “Counties are having to figure this out on their own without the infrastructure the state had in place.”
Pending Cases and Strained Resources
Smith said approximately half of all prosecutions tied to OLS in Kinney County have already been resolved, either through pleas or dismissals, but thousands of cases remain active.
According to numbers from the Texas Indigent Defense Commission, more than 2,600 felony cases have already been resolved. Nearly 2,000 cases are still pending, in part due to lengthy appeals.
Meanwhile, the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office has more than 700 outstanding warrants for alleged smugglers and another 1,400 warrants that have not yet been executed because of limited capacity to house and transport defendants.
Kinney County has contracts with about 10 jails across Texas—including some as far away as the Panhandle—but the county jail cannot hold a person beyond 72 hours, as it is considered a temporary holding facility. That has forced sheriffs and prosecutors into a patchwork system for transferring detainees, with major bottlenecks since TDCJ and TDEM stopped coordinating.
The Dolph Briscoe Unit in Dilley and the Segovia Unit in Edinburg, which had filled major housing roles, are no longer available, worsening the shortage.
Aparicio Case
To highlight these jailing problems is the case of Luis Alfredo Aparicio, an illegal alien who was arrested for criminal trespass in Maverick County as a part of OLS. The State had been prosecuting men, and not women, for this charge because women are required to be housed in separate jail facilities—something the border counties did not have the resources to accommodate.
Aparicio sought to have the charges dismissed, arguing that the State’s selective prosecution of him violated the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause and the Texas Constitution’s Equal Rights Amendment.
Aparicio lost the case, but it was appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court. This caused other attorneys to appeal similar OLS decisions, pausing them until a decision was made.
The Supreme Court ultimately denied Aparicio’s petition for review, allowing other pending selective-prosecution challenges to move forward in trial courts—creating an additional backlog of pending cases.
Smith said dismissing cases en masse is the only other fallback option if counties cannot create a workable housing system—and that doing so is “absolutely not an option.”
Solutions
Earlier this month, sheriffs and prosecutors involved in OLS met to find a solution to these problems.
Smith described the solution that came from the meeting, which he hopes will be implemented in early October.
“The [governor’s office] will be providing the counties with funding to cover the housing and transportation since no longer having this resource is not the fault of the counties,” said Smith. “Sheriff [Joe Frank] Martinez out of Val Verde County and Tonya Ahlschwede with the Border Prosecution Unit have really done a great job trying to coordinate the logistics and communications with the Governor’s office.”
Smith praised the governor’s office for being “very accommodating with the situation these counties are facing” and being “instrumental in forming a solution for us.”
However, he noted that while Gov. Greg Abbott’s office has been supportive in pursuing grant funding, “the money doesn’t come packaged with a solution.”
Officials are weighing a centralized coordination team based in Val Verde County to manage these issues.
The Val Verde County Sheriff’s Office will receive funding for staff to handle all the coordination of confirmed warrants. This includes transportation from where the defendant was arrested on the warrant, locating housing options in Texas of the defendant until charges are resolved, and coordinating travel to and from court.
Smith emphasized that while specific operations come and go, border security does not cease.
“OLS is not over by any means, and many prosecutions are still ongoing to ensure justice is brought to those who violate our laws in Texas,” said Smith.
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