Question 1: What’s the current state of Operation Lone Star’s finances?

 

The current version of what Trump is calling the Big Beautiful Bill contains $12 billion to reimburse all states for border security spending during the last four years.

 

Sen. John Cornyn told the Texas Tribune that’s not enough, he wants $11 billion for Texas alone - the total amount spent on Operation Lone Star since 2021.

 

And the state is going to keep spending its own money. Gov. Abbott is about to sign / recently signed (not signed as of June 25) a spending package that has $3.4 billion for Operation Lone Star in the next two years. That will keep officers from the Texas National Guard and Department of Public Safety stationed at the border. And of course in the past that funding has paid for bussing migrants to New York, Chicago and Denver.

 

 

Question 2: How much has Texas been spending on border security each year?

 

2018-2019: $800 million

2020-2021: $800.6 million

2022-2023: $4.7 billion

2024-2025: $6.6 billion

2025-2026 (proposed): $3.4 billion

 

Texas plans to spend four times more on the border this year than what they were spending in 2020 during Trump’s first term. And Gov. Abbott wanted to spend even more than that according to his budget request, but the Legislature cut his request in half.

 

Texas has also sunk $3 billion into building a border wall but it’s only 8% complete and the new budget does not allocate any money to complete it.

 

The new budget even includes a small amount of money for a study on how to incentivize people to let state police place troops and equipment on their private property as part of border security operations.

 

 

Question 3: How many encounters have there been at the border in the last five years? 

 

In 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term, there were about 40,000 border encounters per month in Texas.

 

That spiked all the way up to almost 300,000 per month under Biden which is why the spending increased. But at the end of Biden’s last year in office, the numbers dropped back to about 40,000 per month. Of course, both Biden and Gov. Abbott tried to take credit for that.

 

Now they’ve dropped even lower. There were less than 9,000 encounters with migrants at the Texas border this May, one of the lowest numbers since the 1960’s. But the state’s spending has yet to decrease by a similar amount.

 

 

Question 4: So do we know if Operation Lone Star is working?

 

There’s two different perspectives on this. Maybe the fact that border encounters are so low is a sign that Operation Lone Star is working, and Texas should keep spending a lot of money on it. Or maybe the low border encounters is a sign that Texas can safely cut funding for border security.

 

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board said in 2023 “there is no indication Operation Lone Star has worked.”

 

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University who has researched the border and U.S.-Mexico relations, told the Texas Tribune it’s “impossible” to know if Operation Lone Star is the reason illegal immigration is down - there are so many variables, like Mexico’s own immigration enforcement or economic conditions in other countries that increase or decrease immigration.