How a rural Texas sheriff became a poster child for serving Trump’s immigration goals

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Nearly three weeks ago, after a ceremony to sign Texas’ newest immigration enforcement law into place, Gov. Greg Abbott took to the stage with two distinguished specialists for a discussion about how Texas is leading the way in border security.

One was Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s “border czar” tasked with overseeing the administration’s immigration crackdown.

The other, lesser-known figure, clad in a white Stetson hat and caramel-colored cowboy boots, was Roy Boyd.

Boyd is the sheriff of Goliad County, a tiny community of roughly 7,000 people about halfway between Houston and Mexico, who has emerged as a model for how sheriffs can serve in Trump’s immigration enforcement apparatus.

A career police officer, Boyd was elected sheriff in 2020, promising voters to combat what he described as an “all-time high” proliferation of drugs in the county. A year into the job, his focus shifted as illegal border crossings began an ascent that Boyd says was accompanied by crime.

Now, his national profile and conservative bona fides are on the rise. He’s appeared on podcasts hosted by Dr. Phil and the influential conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation as a border expert. He’s been a guest at other border security events hosted by Abbott, and has a Dimmitt Flag — a flag raised in Goliad during the Texas Revolution — signed by the governor hanging in his office. His tales about drug violence in the borderlands have garnered fawning coverage in conservative media, including a profile about the “Loco Gringo” of Goliad County taking on Mexican cartels.

Boyd earned early favor with Abbott when he suggested four years ago the governor’s office give grants to local law enforcement to respond to the historic increase of illegal border crossings under the Biden administration — which became a hallmark of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border clampdown.

“Gov. Abbott threw us a lifeline,” Boyd said in an interview this spring. “Without that funding, without his support, there's no way we could have kept up.”

With Trump carried back to office with promises of deporting undocumented people en masse, Boyd has also become one of the loudest cheerleaders for partnerships between sheriffs and ICE to offer the federal agency unprecedented access to jails and deputies. He’s signed three different agreements that local law enforcement can enter with ICE to extend limited immigration enforcement authority to his deputies.

Boyd has urged fellow sheriffs to also enter agreements with ICE. But he may not have to do much convincing.

Since February, the number of such partnerships between Texas sheriffs and ICE has exploded by roughly 325% and will continue to grow. Come September, most sheriffs will be required to sign at least one agreement under the law that Abbott signed at the ceremony with Homan and Boyd — even those in urban, Democratic areas who have been resistant to and even protested cooperating with ICE in the past.

“There's two ways to run a sheriff's office. You can run it as a political office,” Boyd said. “Or you can run like a law enforcement agency and you can take your duties seriously as a conservator of the peace, as the state says we are, and you can actually go out and enforce the laws. A simple philosophy. I was elected to do a job — by God I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna do it the best way I know.”

Small town sheriff

Boyd, a seventh-generation Texan, grew up in Goliad hanging out in the predominantly Hispanic La Bahía neighborhood, named after the historic Spanish presidio that preceded the city and served as its origin.

Now a resident of the neighborhood, Boyd saw many of his friends from youth move away “to make a decent living,” but still have obligations to take care of their older family members. The opportunities in the city are limited. It’s still rural and sleepy, desolate and dusty — making a living can be hard.

As a police officer working up the ranks in nearby Victoria, he said he learned that corporations need public safety assurances. He recounted having to field questions from companies interested in moving into town. When they do move in, they are often accompanied by economic booms.

He decided to run for sheriff because he wanted to make Goliad an “uninviting place” for criminals. He won his seat without drawing a challenger.

Now a small-town sheriff, Boyd wants to take on Mexican cartels. He has a wife, four kids and vested interest to see his community prosper, he said.

He compares the criminal enterprises to corporations. To win the battle, he says business for cartels has to deteriorate. And to do that, law enforcement must collaborate.

He likens the cartel's operations to contractors and subcontractors: a network of people moving immigrants and drugs from the border to the state’s largest inland cities. One contractor often does not personally know the next, he claims, and if they are arrested they won’t know much about anyone in charge to rat on.

His solution is for police to share officers, collect intelligence and share that, too.

“We're up against an adversary that is highly adaptable and that is present in multiple nations across the world,” Boyd said. “We can no longer act like the Lone Ranger and go out and try to do things on our own.”

Operation Lone Star

In 2021, as the number of illegal border crossings was skyrocketing, Goliad County — about a three-hour drive from the Mexican border — was among the first to declare a local emergency disaster.

Another was Kinney, whose county attorney wrote an open letter to state leaders making the case that the state was being invaded.

Brent Smith, the county attorney, recounted to The Texas Tribune when Boyd and Goliad County Judge Mike Bennett drove nearly four hours to Bracketville to meet with him the day after he posted the letter online, where it circulated on social media and Boyd’s wife spotted it first — sending it to the judge and sheriff.

“We met in the courtroom and basically kind of just spitballed like, you know, what can we do in this crisis where the federal government has just laid down — they're not helping,” Smith said, referring to frustration with the Biden administration’s handling of the border.

The declaration proved to be crucial. It enabled counties to seek emergency funds to respond to the border upheaval. Other counties followed suit.

Then the governor declared a disaster at the state level — granting him broad powers to spend money in the name of securing the border.

About a month after Abbott declared the disaster, he hosted a group of sheriffs in Austin to brief them on the state’s efforts to secure the border and hear about their own efforts.

Boyd said it was at that July 2021 meeting that he pitched Abbott on the idea of giving local law enforcement grants with few strings attached so that they could pay for overtime, hire new officers, and purchase equipment like fresh patrol units. Some sheriffs have used the state money to buy things like pepper ball launchers, guns that fire less-than-lethal munitions that irritate the skin and eyes.

The grants, which were crucial to getting local buy-in from the border counties, became a key aspect of Operation Lone Star.

Boyd also started an initiative, which he called the Operation Lone Star Task Force, to pool deputies and resources for investigations targeting smugglers, instead of operating in silos restricted to each of their jurisdictions. As of July, 57 law enforcement agencies — 36 of them sheriffs — had signed agreements to share officers for such joint operations, according to a list provided by Boyd.

The idea might appear simple, if not obvious. But traditionally, law enforcement has not always operated like that — police often stay in their jurisdiction except for specific, bigger investigations.

Boyd wants the Trump administration to replicate it across the country, essentially creating a big law enforcement agency with easy-to-move officers and resources — reporting to Homan, Trump’s go-to immigration enforcer.

The White House did not avail Homan for an interview. Instead a spokesperson offered a statement of gratitude for local law enforcement collaborating with the administration.

Sheriffs lead the way

Sheriffs are convenient allies for ICE. Unlike police chiefs, they are elected to office. They serve warrants and run county lock-ups, the source of many deportations where inmates’ names are scrubbed through a variety of databases and where sheriffs can hold people for ICE to pick them up.

“The key here is that sheriffs have a lot of authority in counties,” said Austin Kocher, a researcher of the nation’s immigration enforcement system who has written about sheriffs partnering with ICE. “They view it as being sort of higher significance.”

Even without adopting Boyd’s suggestion, sheriffs are already set to supercharge Trump’s immigration crackdown — especially in Texas.

The federal government offers three kinds of the partnerships that local authorities can enter with ICE, known as 287(g) agreements. Two of the programs are limited to jails.

The third program, called the task force model, is perhaps the most controversial and helpful for the Trump administration: It lets deputies question a person’s immigration status during their regular patrol duties in the field and arrest people for administrative immigration warrants. The Trump administration restarted the program this year after it was stopped due to racial profiling about a decade ago.

No sheriff has highlighted the concerns surrounding the task force model in practice like Joe Arpaio, who as the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County oversaw deputies accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of racially profiling Latinos. A federal judge ordered Arpaio to stop conducting immigration raids. He refused. After a federal judge held Arpaio in contempt of court, Trump in 2017 pardoned him.

As of late July, 102 Texas law enforcement agencies — all but four of them sheriff’s offices — had struck at least one 287(g) agreement with ICE, including 29 who had signed up for the task force model.

In comparison, 24 sheriffs had inked 287(g) agreements with ICE by the end of July 2017 — six months into Trump’s first term — and all were limited to jails.

This particularly worries immigrants’ rights advocates: How will local authorities far from the Mexican border, tasked with patrolling diverse communities, incorporate immigration enforcement authority when they are forced to collaborate with ICE?

“Look, we've already seen it in Arizona,” Texas Rep. Ramon Romero Jr., a Fort Worth Democrat, said in an interview. “That's a grave concern for communities.
It's certainly a grave concern for communities that already feel a little like police aren't necessarily on their side anymore.”

In his office during the interview, Boyd called racial profiling concerns “a bunch of bullshit.”

Disclosure: Texas Public Policy Foundation has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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