A year into Abbott's Operation Lone Star border crackdown, court chaos and blown deadlines persist
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, right, shakes a National Guard member's hand after speaking during a September news conference along the Rio Grande. Migrants arrested under Abbott’s border security push have been imprisoned for weeks or months waiting to appear before a judge.In the weeks leading up to the November midterms, Gov.
More recently, authorities have shifted their focus to catching people transporting migrants in their cars and charging them with felonies such as human smuggling. Those more complex cases are also overwhelming the Kinney County courts, according to interviews with defense attorneys, a review of the limited court documents that are available, and legislative hearings.
“That’s kind of their narrative. If you have an undocumented person in your car, you are smuggling,” Bibby said. In a House committee hearing last month, a district attorney on the state-funded Border Prosecution Unit — which aids prosecutors in border counties with Operation Lone Star cases — said state troopers may take 15 to 30 days to file basic reports needed to prosecute smuggling cases. Without access to arrest reports, prosecutors cannot decide if a case is “ready for indictment or not,” said the DA, Republican Tonya Ahlschwede.
“The department is working closely with federal, state and local partners to adjust operations at the border and ensure things run as smoothly as possible,” Miller said in an email.The true scope of the chaos that Operation Lone Star has wreaked on border-area courts is difficult to assess because court documents are not easily available, and the courtrooms are in remote border locations far from any major city.
It appears that the county courts are similarly buckling under the weight of the felony human smuggling arrests. In the year before Operation Lone Star began, West’s office handled a total of 64 felony cases. So far this year, her office has filed more than 800 cases. The majority of those cases involve U.S. citizens, hundreds of whom are in the state-run lockups, data show.
The next step would be to take the issue to court — usually Andrade’s court, if the case originated in Kinney County. An attorney could file a motion with the county clerk asking Andrade to order the prosecutor to hand over the evidence. has been indicted, the judge can let the person out of jail on a cashless bond or reduce their bond amount.
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