Jerry Glaser/U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Last June, I stood outside Arturo Fonseca’s home in Mission, Texas, near the spot where an SUV pursued by U.S. Border Patrol agents and Texas state troopers collided with a car in December 2021, killing Carmen Huerta Sosa, fifty-nine, and her twenty two-year-old daughter, Viridiana Charon Lloyd.
This deadly collision came nine months after Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott deployed troopers and National Guard soldiers to the border in what he called “Operation Lone Star.” Fonseca, who witnessed the aftermath of the collision, put it in simple terms: “They are causing the deaths of innocent people.”
High-speed vehicle pursuits are deadly—and under Operation Lone Star, they are increasing at alarming rates. In a report released in November by Human Rights Watch, where I am a researcher, we found the increase is more than 1,000 percent in several counties. At least seventy-four people were killed, and another 189 injured, as the result of forty-nine pursuits in counties where Operation Lone Star has been carried out.
As the Biden administration and conservative members of Congress negotiate for even more punitive policies at the border as a tradeoff for foreign policy goals, Texas shows that punitive border policies—whether imposed by a state or the federal government—do only one thing: bring state-sanctioned violence and death to migrants and border communities alike.
Death, injury, and destruction are what it means, in practice, to seek in vain to deter unauthorized border crossings. As a former police chief in a county implementing Operation Lone Star told Human Rights Watch, “No life is worth risking if all you have is undocumented people in the car.”
Like the mother and daughter who died in Mission, some of the other people killed during chases were not directly involved in the pursuit. Seven-year-old Emilia Tambunga and her grandmother, Maria Alvarez, died in March in Ozona when a vehicle pursued by Crockett County sheriff’s deputies for a speeding violation struck the pickup truck they were riding in.
And in Laredo, Alejandra Torres Flores, sixty-two, a local resident, died in November 2021 after an SUV pursued by a state trooper for failing to obey a traffic stop collided with her vehicle. The pursuit reached speeds of 110 mph.
We found that 81 percent of pursuits were initiated because of a traffic violation, usually a minor offense that can serve as a pretext to investigate the vehicle for the transport of migrants.
Just as in Eagle Pass, Texas—where once-receptive residents have soured on Governor Abbott’s deployment of a bladed floating barrier on the Rio Grande and razor wire on its banks—vehicle pursuits are yet another example of state officials peddling a false sense of border security.
The governor’s rhetoric is not supported by the reality on the ground. That is why, in Eagle Pass and across the state, initial support has given way to frustration with state trooper deployments, outrage at the inhumane treatment of migrants, and great personal harm to residents and migrants alike.
It’s telling that so many people I interviewed for our report from across the political spectrum shared a common concern: that Texans are being endangered by the rise in unnecessary police pursuits, which have shaken their communities.
Texas officials should end all extreme border enforcement tactics based on a failed strategy of deterrence. And the Biden administration would be wise to end federal funding for agencies that carry out Operation Lone Star's chaotic agenda.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.