Maverick County Attorney Jaime Iracheta works in a freshly refurbished, wood-paneled office with a matching desk and leather couch set.
He holds meetings in a video-equipped conference room and drives to work in a heavy-duty Chevy Silverado 4X4 pickup with a premium trim and towing package. It cost $83,000, and it’s one of six pickups the office owns.
That doesn’t include the two Polaris Ranger Crew all-terrain vehicles purchased in December for $25,000 apiece. One of them is a Texas Edition “offering enhanced capability along with exclusive Texas Edition badging and premium paint,” procurement records show.
Texas taxpayers paid for all of this — and more — through Operation Lone Star, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s much-touted border security initiative.
Lone Star is best-known for the thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guard soldiers Abbott has deployed to patrol the border, string razor wire and detain undocumented immigrants.
With less fanfare, the state also has doled out more than $100 million since 2021 to counties and cities to cover border enforcement costs. The grants were supposed to pay for more police officers and sheriff’s deputies, added jail capacity and the cost of prosecuting migrants on state trespassing charges.
Much of the grant money has been spent for those purposes. But over the last four years, millions of dollars have gone to fund routine government operations and other expenses that in some cases were unrelated to border security, an investigation by the San Antonio Express-News and Houston Chronicle found.
Reporters interviewed officeholders and law enforcement officials and reviewed records on more than 4,600 Operation Lone Star grants approved from September 2021 through January of this year. The governor’s office authorized about $177 million in grants during that period and paid out about $113 million.
The records were obtained through the state’s Public Information Act. Some were redacted, and in many cases explanations for spending were vague, making it impossible to determine how all the money was spent.
Border crossings this year are near record lows. President Joe Biden, whose policies Abbott said necessitated his border initiative, is out of office, replaced by the governor’s close ally, President Donald Trump. Yet the Texas Legislature just extended the Lone Star grant program for two more years.
To qualify for grants, local governments have to issue a declaration of disaster, aligning themselves with Abbott’s position that Biden’s immigration policies caused an “invasion”— a stance that raised the governor’s national profile and influenced the 2024 presidential election.
In exchange for the grants, Abbott has secured backing for his signature issue from elected leaders in a part of Texas that was once a Democratic stronghold. Some county officials have said they aren’t facing a border crisis, and that they issued disaster declarations simply to get the money.
It’s a long story so go read the rest. One can certainly make sarcastic remarks about wasteful spending or mission bloat or whatever else, and one would not be wrong. My thinking is more along the lines of why doesn’t the state give more money to more counties to help fund basic services? In the last twenty-plus years, the state has underfunded public schools, put numerous unfunded mandates on local governments, such as forbidding the reduction of spending in any form on law enforcement, restricted what cities and counties can do in terms of governing themselves, and limited their revenue growth with plans to do more of that in the special sessions. It’s no wonder that counties on the receiving end of Operation Lone Star’s largesse, many of which are not on the border, grab that cash with both hands and use it on whatever they can. It’s just survival.
Anyway, that’s the lens through which I would view this. Oh sure, some of the choices that various county governments have made can and should be criticized. As I said, you can read the rest for more. All I’m saying is that if as a matter of routine Texas’ counties could fully take care of themselves, the money Greg Abbott is throwing at them for “border security” might be more likely to be used for that purpose. Well, up to the point of ridiculously diminishing returns, anyway. I could have written that post, too.
Why won’t the state lower the amount of sales tax from 6 cents to 4 cents? They have a surplus, and they should show the rest of the state how to do the same with less.
Soon, if not already, we will have a sales tax on a sales tax (Tariffs.)