“Operation Lone Star 2.0”: DPS arresting thousands of undocumented immigrants across Texas to aid Trump’s mass deportation

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Texas Department of Public Safety officers have helped arrest more than 3,000 undocumented immigrants across the state this year, according to public records obtained by The Texas Tribune that provide the most detailed glimpse yet of how state police are shifting their focus from the border toward aiding the Trump administration’s mass deportation crusade — an effort that state officials have kept largely under wraps.

From late January through early September, DPS recorded 3,131 previously unreported arrests connected to specialty teams created at the direction of Gov. Greg Abbott to help President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, the agency’s records show. Roughly 88% of the people arrested were picked up on suspicion of violating federal immigration laws like improper entry into the country, marking what may be an unprecedented use of state resources for a role once performed exclusively by federal authorities.

“Operation Lone Star 2.0 is underway statewide — with DPS personnel working to combat and interdict criminal activity with a nexus to the border,” DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen said in an email, referring to Texas’ border initiative under the Biden administration for which thousands of troopers were dispatched to the border.

Amid a sharp fall in illegal border crossings, DPS has moved some of its troopers and investigators onto “strike teams” that work with federal agencies across Texas — including in each of the largest metro areas — to arrest people “who have entered the United States illegally and then gone on to commit crimes in the state,” according to the agency.

The federal government has sole authority to enforce immigration violations under federal law. State and local police can’t arrest someone simply for being undocumented without agreements that extend them limited power to do so. As of late July, DPS had no such agreements in place with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency under DHS’ umbrella that oversees much of the nation’s immigration policing, according to DPS records and an ICE database of active partnerships.

Nolen said DPS officers have jurisdiction across Texas to “protect and serve every corner” of the state, though she noted that officers “must have probable cause” to apprehend someone.

The agency has otherwise remained tight-lipped about its deportation efforts, having yet to offer details about how the strike teams function, how they decide who to target or where the people who have been arrested are located now.

Nolen declined to directly respond to a list of questions about the operations, citing the agency’s policy of not disclosing “operational specifics.”

Department officials do not know the whereabouts of those arrested by DPS’ strike teams because they do not keep track of them once they leave the agency’s custody, Nolen said, also deferring to federal authorities for details about their criminal histories.

The Trump administration has said it would prioritize deporting violent criminals, and DPS’ leader has said state authorities working with the feds share the focus. As of mid-August, DPS had identified nearly 6,500 “criminal illegal immigrants with active felony warrants in Texas for a variety of offenses,” Nolen said, including murder, drug and sex crimes, and human smuggling. Officers from all DPS divisions arrested roughly 30,000 people from the start of the year through July.

“Right now, we're going after the migrants that pose the largest threat to the communities,” DPS Director Freeman Martin told the Public Safety Commission, which he answers to, in February. “And there's a lot of them.”

Reports for seven of the arrests, also obtained through a public information request, suggest DPS officers are using a broad range of tactics to apprehend people and, at least for this limited sample size, targeting those with a mix of serious and nonexistent criminal history.

Among them was a Honduran man in Austin who was riding in the passenger seat of a car stopped for an expired registration after DPS apparently staked out his home. An ICE agent with DPS at the scene detained the man upon confirming he had overstayed a visa. Court records show he had been accused of domestic violence in 2022, but the case was later dropped.

In another case, a man was arrested at a Dallas home, where officers arrived after tracking GPS data, according to an arrest report that provided no further details about the tracking. The man had no previous criminal cases listed in federal or local databases.

Two others were arrested in a targeted probe with the feds that led authorities to $16,000 worth of marijuana, cocaine and meth. Both had faced drug charges in the past, Harris County court records show.

Many of the immigration arrests occurred hundreds of miles from the border. Nearly 700 — at least one in five — took place in either Austin, Dallas or Houston, where left-leaning local officials have historically resisted cooperating with federal immigration authorities. Those figures are almost certainly an undercount because the DPS records did not say where more than 1,000 of the arrests took place.

The focus on crackdowns far away from the border “raises red flags,” said Osvaldo Grimaldo, a lawyer with the ACLU of Texas, which has accused DPS of using racial profiling and focusing on migrants accused of low-level offenses in its recent border policing.

“As DPS is expanding these efforts into parts of the interior of the state, what are the intentions?” Grimaldo asked. “Are they being lawful? Are they collaborating with other agencies at the municipal level?”

Operation Lone Star without the fanfare

The regional tactical strike teams mark the latest plunge into immigration enforcement for Texas’ main public safety agency, whose troopers have long been known for dishing out speeding tickets and warnings for busted tail lights. The sprawling agency also issues driver’s licenses, among other regulatory duties, and often takes the lead on major criminal probes, including the bungled response to the deadly Uvalde school shooting in 2022.

DPS had already ramped up its presence at the Texas-Mexico border over the last decade. Abbott escalated things to new levels four years ago, when he ordered thousands of troopers to be dispatched to the state’s 1,254-mile southern border as part of his Operation Lone Star program to deter border crossings.

At the time, DPS was not making federal immigration arrests. Instead, officers arrested thousands of asylum-seeking immigrants for trespassing on private property, a state offense, as the number of illegal border crossings hit record highs.

Those novel misdemeanor arrests carried a maximum penalty of one year in jail, and became a source of controversy as Texas escalated its immigration enforcement unlike any state had ever done, drawing questions about whether migrants were being denied due process and other constitutional rights.

The number of illegal crossings began tanking last summer and has continued to plunge under the Trump administration. Still, the Legislature earmarked another $3.4 billion for border security earlier this year, giving about one-third of it to DPS with an eye toward immigration enforcement in the state’s interior.

Eight days after Trump took office for his second term, Abbott directed DPS to deploy strike teams that could help the Trump administration “locate and arrest criminal illegal immigrants in the state.”

“After four years of failed policies, Texas finally has a partner in President Trump,” Abbott said. “Together, we will end this crisis and make America safe once again.”

Since then, DPS has issued statements acknowledging individual arrests conducted by the teams but said nothing about their overall productivity — a stark contrast to the highly publicized accomplishments touted under Operation Lone Star.

The governor and agency frequently shared updates on arrests and drug seizures stemming from the border program. They posted photos and videos of migrants being arrested, held press conferences in cities along the border to unveil new initiatives, and along the way drew the Biden administration into a constitutional fight over how much authority a state has to enforce immigration laws.

In comparison, little information is being released or celebrated about the strike teams.

That includes one team’s major raid of a party in Hays County earlier this year, initially detailed by DPS as a bust of alleged gang members and their associates carried out with various federal agencies. Authorities arrested almost four dozen people during the raid, children among them.

But party guests have denied having gang affiliations and said they had rented a big house with a swimming pool to celebrate a pair of birthdays — including that of a kid who instead turned 5 in ICE detention, the Tribune previously reported.

All 35 detainees identified by the Tribune were arrested on suspicion of illegally entering the country. None had previous criminal cases listed in federal or local databases.

An uncertain scope

Such state apprehensions are only part of the deportation efforts underway across multiple layers of government. The tally of immigrants arrested by DPS’ strike teams doesn’t account for those picked up after being stopped by local law enforcement or instances where federal immigration authorities are working on their own.

There are also signs that the scope and scale of DPS' deportation operations extend beyond the more than 3,100 strike team arrests. The DPS spokesperson noted that the agency aided a massive ICE operation last month that led the feds to arrest more than 800 suspected undocumented immigrants; it was not clear if such efforts are counted toward DPS' strike team arrest tally. Additionally, records obtained by the Tribune show that at least one of the detainees was deported along with family members who were not counted among the apprehensions.

That arrest began when a state trooper followed Omar Gallardo Rodriguez’s white truck for about two minutes before pulling him over next to Dobie Middle School in North Austin over a traffic infraction. His wife, Denisse Parra Vargas, was in the passenger seat, according to video recorded by the DPS trooper’s dash camera. The footage showed that, within an hour of being pulled over, Rodriguez was whisked away by a masked officer accompanying five DPS troopers to the scene.

Within a week, federal agents also deported Parra Vargas — who had entered the country illegally seeking protection from a previous abusive partner, advocates say — and their kids, two of whom were born in the United States.

DHS officials have labeled Rodriguez a “serial lawbreaker” in past statements for previous accusations of assaulting a family member, driving under the influence and entering the country illegally four times.

The family’s lawyers declined to comment and Rodriguez did not respond to an email.

Arrests like Rodriguez’s could become more frequent as DPS and its federal partners gain reinforcements next year under a new Texas law that will require most sheriffs in the state to enter agreements with ICE. Roughly 11% of all Texas sheriffs have already inked agreements with the federal agency — according to ICE records from early September — for a controversial program that extends deputies the authority to ask people about their legal status during their routine patrols.

Approximately 2.1 million undocumented immigrants call Texas home, second in the nation only to California. The Trump administration has not regularly published data about its deportation efforts, but recent independent research suggests that for the first time in decades, more immigrants have left the U.S. than arrived so far this year.

Outside of Houston, members with FIEL — an acronym that translates to Immigrant Families and Students in the Fight — have recorded accounts of DPS troopers waiting to stop people for traffic violations off Highway 59 near a massive subdivision north of the city that has been a lightning rod among Republican officials because its developer sells land to undocumented people.

“It’s happening every day,” said Alain Cisneros, a FIEL organizer who knocked doors in the neighborhoods to conduct a survey that found many of the residents are living in great fear.

He said it appeared like a replica of Operation Lone Star — but 400 miles from the Mexican border.

Disclosure: ACLU Texas 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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