The state quietly shuttered a jail booking facility in Val Verde County last summer that had operated as a hub of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border crackdown, state officials acknowledged Tuesday.
Texas officials had opened two such sites for the governor’s border initiative, which surged Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and State Guard members to the more than 1,250 miles of border Texas shares with Mexico. Operation Lone Star was started early in the Biden administration in response to the White House’s immigration policies and continued as the number of illegal border crossings reached new highs.
At the facilities, officers booked asylum-seeking migrants on state charges of criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail, and human smuggling, a more serious felony that was largely leveled against thousands of young Americans.
