EAGLE PASS, Texas (NewsNation) — After spending billions on attempting to take control of the southern border the past two years, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star has shown no indication of actually working, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Since 2021, Abbott has escalated measures to keep migrants from entering the U.S., pushing legal boundaries with a go-it-alone bravado along the state’s 1,200-mile border with Mexico. Now, blowback over the tactics is widening.
Abbott, who cruised to a third term in November while promising tougher border crackdowns, has used disaster declarations as the legal bedrock for some measures.
Now, his latest measure to secure the border — which includes wrecking ball-sized buoys in the Rio Grande — is being questioned by the Department of Justice, saying it violates federal law and raises humanitarian concerns for migrants crossing.
On Twitter, the governor said he was acting within his state’s rights.
“Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the U.S. Constitution and the Texas Constitution,” he tweeted.
However, even though illegal crossings have actually dropped recently, the program’s efficiency has been under question, the WSJ reported.
“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,” the WSJ reported. “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.”
The courts have found that many of the arrests made under Operation Lone Star were discriminatory, invalidating them, the WSJ reported.
The WSJ report also said that only 1% of migrant encounters were conducted by Operation Lone Star personnel, which added only about 11,000 to Border Patrol’s 850,000 encounters.
Yet, Texas is sticking to its strategy, doubling down on Operation Lone Star, which has $9.5 billion of allocated funding through 2025, the WSJ said.
Abbott continues to ask other states for additional resources and officers as the border remains in crisis.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.