The move is a vote of confidence that the Biden mass migration crisis really is over
By Todd Bensman as published March 17, 2025 by the Center for Immigration Studies. A modified version of this report appeared in the March 16, 2025 editions of The New York Post
After four years and more than $11 billion spent battling the worst mass migration border crisis in U.S. history, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” has repositioned most state troopers and police personnel from a southern border riverfront that quickly fell quiet once President Donald Trump entered office and ended the crisis with new policies.
Texas has relieved some of its Department of Public Safety troopers and criminal investigations agents and others of mandatory, grinding nine- and 14-day tour requirements and moved a great many off of the 1,254 miles of the border river for the first time in four years, multiple officials confirmed when asked why DPS was conspicuously absent from the El Paso-Juarez region.
Gone from the river’s edge for the first time in years are the state trooper patrol cars, a lot of camouflage-clad special response teams guarding miles of Texas-installed concertina wire barricades and cargo container bulwarks, and plain-clothed criminal investigators brought in from distant parts of the state. All had become a ubiquitous presence on the river year after year at a cost of billions of dollars in state tax money.
Those changes have produced a kind of “peace dividend” for state law enforcement officers from all over the state. They were sent to contend with years of border chaos triggered when President Joe Biden entered office and ordered that most illegal border-crossers be accepted into the country, an unprecedented policy that eventually drew an estimated 10-12 million to enter from around the world.
Operation Lone Star (OLS) has had to shape-shift somewhat as a response to new historically low illegal border crossings, acknowledged Lt. Chris Olivarez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, but he noted that Gov. Greg Abbott and DPS “remain strongly committed to maintaining public safety” using regional officers to keep pressure on Mexico’s drug cartels, including “disrupting criminal activity on major highway corridors used for human and drug smuggling”.
Some commissioned Texas DPS officers working under OLS still serve on “brush crews” that chase down illegal immigrant “runners” and drug and alien smugglers on private ranches not far from the river, Olivarez said. Texas Rangers tactical teams, criminal investigators stationed in border areas, marine assets, and tracking dogs will continue working the regions. Area-based agents will help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hunt down criminal aliens in Texas cities, Olivarez said. And Texas National Guard units will remain on the river, Olivarez said, now deputized to help Border Patrol make immigration arrests.
“Due to the overall decrease in illegal border crossings and lack of large groups of illegal immigrants crossing the river to claim asylum, DPS has been able to increase its focus on the criminal element in the border regions stemming from the border in areas across the state,” Olivarez said.
In its original form, OLS became storied and controversial during its first four years. Its in-your-face presence all along the river could be neither missed nor ignored. The Texas troopers and National Guard became well known for building massive bulwarks of concertina wire, fencing, and cargo containers, then from behind them physically power-blocking migrants at the river’s edge from reaching Border Patrol agents stationed behind them (who, under Biden, would release them all into America). Or firing caustic pepper ball rounds at charging crowds and concertina wire-cutting migrants. Or for their careening high-speed car chases of smugglers. The Texas Rangers once even seized and cleared a large river island known as a dangerous base for Mexican cartel gunmen. Its tactical marine units saved many drowning migrants too.
But the need for state police moved off the river and into the interior after Trump entered office, and OLS will go with it.
“Unfortunately, there is much to do to address transnational and regional gangs still working with the cartels,” one recently departed DPS official said.
Confirming Trump’s Sea Change at the Border
Texas DPS block illegal border-crossers from Matamoros in May 2023. Photo by Todd Bensman.
Still, ending OLS’s central requirement that almost all DPS officers report for long tours on the river itself — and their obvious absence — reflects a sea change since Gov. Abbott first ordered them down in March 2021. The purpose of putting thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guard on the river was to fill gaps on the line created when the Biden administration decided to accept most illegal border-crossers into the country and ordered federal Border Patrol agents off the line to staff “processing centers” to do the paperwork. The federal mass-release policies had the effect of incentivizing millions to pour over the Texas border, and Gov. Abbott felt he had to do something.
Recently, Abbott’s official OLS web page was updated in a way that, while not providing many details, did suggest that the mission has changed to move with the threats since Trump entered office on January 20 and ordered Border Patrol with military units onto the river to hunt, detain, prosecute, and deport all illegal border-crossers, rather than to admit them into the country. The Trump administration also deployed thousands more active-duty troops from California to Texas to assist the new hunt-and-deport policy. Crossings immediately plummeted to historic lows and a kind of tranquility settled on the river.
“Now, Texas has a partner in the White House to restore the rule of law and defend our nation at the southern border,” the governor’s OLS page reads, in part. To support Trump’s mission, it went on, Abbott supported the federal deputization of Texas National Guard troops to help Border Patrol arrest illegal aliens and directed DPS “to deploy tactical strike teams to help locate and arrest criminal illegal immigrants, and more”.
The crossing numbers and new White House orders for Border Patrol to return to normal duty argued for a reprieve. From California to Texas, Southwest border encounters between ports of entry in the brush fell from 140,641 in February 2024 (large percentages of those processed by Border Patrol for release into the US interior) to 8,347 in February 2025 (almost all detained, deported, or referred for illegal-entry prosecutions). In Texas, the number fell from 53,460 a year ago (most of them released into the U.S.) to 5,016, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection website shows, almost all deported.
Impact of Policy Changes on Migrant Decision-Making.
In Juarez recently, many recently aspiring illegal border crossers said they won’t dare try a crossing now because they’d get caught, deported, and/or prosecuted on the U.S. side. They also complained that smuggling fees had skyrocketed due to the much higher risk that local smugglers would go to prison if caught.
“The border is a problem,” said a former Venezuelan soldier named Angel while working as a shopping center parking lot attendant in Juarez, earning $100 per week. He’d arrived two months earlier, hoping to enter the U.S. on a temporary “humanitarian” parole program the Biden administration ran on a phone app called CBP One. But Trump cancelled the entry program, leaving Angel and thousands like him stranded behind a just-slammed gate.
“The people I know who crossed illegally got caught and immediately deported” to far southern Mexico by air, he said. An illegal crossing is out of the question for him because the “mafia” coyote smugglers will charge between $2,000 and $2,500 and then leave people alone without a guide on the Texas side.
“Then the Americans take you and send you back, and you lose the money,” Angel said. “I’m not going to risk my money and my life.” Angel plans to settle in Mexico for a few years.
Reprieve from Relentless Marriage-Damaging River Duty
Texas’s quiet move reflects the clearest outside assessment yet of confidence that the Biden mass migration crisis is indeed over, at least for the next four years.
Texas is cashing in on this peace dividend in the form of alleviating heavy work burdens put on its thousands of state police officers who have quietly sacrificed personal lives.
The burdens and strains on all Texas state police officers proved relentless. No matter where in the state they lived, none were excused from years of repeated, rotating border duty tours that involved relocating to river-town motels for two weeks of 12-hour shift days, plus two more for travel time. The grind went on for years, taking a toll on marriages, children, and personal lives even when the tours were reduced to more frequent nine-day stretches.
“The two-week shifts were horrendous on families,” said Brian Nichols, a now-retired Criminal Investigations Division supervisor called to river duty from his Houston-area station. He still recalls a tour that had him on the river on Christmas Day instead of with his just-born grandchild and wife. For those with young families or a sick elderly parent, long-term care had to be arranged.
“I’ve heard of many divorces that occurred over the last four years, a lot of strife in marriages,” Nichols said, noting that a DPS wives page online was often filled with invective. “I know people still with DPS are ecstatic that they don’t have to go for nine days at a time on this extra duty. Their personal lives will settle out. They can resume their routine duties in their home duty stations.”
Said another active-duty DPS agent who was repeatedly called to river duty: “We really needed a respite.”
Despite the personal sacrifices, though, Nichols noted that he and all the DPS officers he oversaw and knew recognized it was all for a greater good.
“Everybody definitely had buy-in,” he said. “And I know this for a fact: We definitely saved lives. There were people who would have drowned but for our presence. And I think, had we not been there physically even more people would have crossed.”
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