Washington, DC (October 20, 2021) –  The Center for Immigration Studies reports that Texas Governor Greg Abbott has initiated the first-ever border security operations in which thousands of National Guard troops — newly imbued with civilian arrest authority and given 40 hours of traditional police training in the use of deadly force — have started handcuffing illegally entering migrants on state trespassing charges.

Small-scale soldier arrest operations began quietly this week as an unprecedented addition to the state’s ongoing “Operation Lone Star” in close physical coordination with a pre-existing border surge of some 1,000 Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officers concentrated in Val Verde and Starr counties, but also expected to happen elsewhere. Abbott has been signaling for weeks that he was preparing a more aggressive use of the National Guard.

Texas DPS Director Steven McCraw confirmed to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that the first of some 3,000 policing-trained National Guard soldiers to be deployed over the next six weeks have begun filling gaps in the line, making arrests and turning their detainees over to DPS officers who will do the investigation and charging.

“Nobody’s ever really used the guard before in this capacity,” McCraw said. “We’re going to use them to actually secure the border. The governor, the legislature, and the citizens of Texas have made it very clear; they want the border secure. It is good for our federal partner as well. The federal government should be thanking the state of Texas, and it’ll make the rest of the country safer as we increase the level of security.”

Todd Bensman, the Center’s Texas-based senior national security fellow, said, "This move by Texas, which occupies the longest front-line stretch of border and feels and sees what is happening more than any other state, especially more than the District of Columbia, really illustrates that this mass migration crisis has become so extreme that radical policy innovations like this have become necessary.”

Bensman continued, “Texas is pushing all known boundaries to do something, anything to staunch what its electorate broadly feels is a foreign assault and invasion. Whether these brand new and historic remedies will work remains to be seen; federal policy makers at the White House are working at odds with what Texas is trying. But the fact that the state bearing the brunt of an epic, historic mass migration like this one is struggling on alone should send a signal to the American people more broadly that something is very, terribly wrong in the country.”