After four years and more than $11 billion spent battling the worst mass migration border crisis in US history, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star has repositioned most state troopers and police personnel from a southern border riverfront that quickly fell quiet after President Donald Trump entered office.
Texas has quietly stood down its state police, criminal investigations agents, Texas Rangers, and SWAT teams off the 1,954-miles of Rio Grande for the first time in four years, officials confirmed when recently asked why they were conspicuously absent from the El Paso-Juarez region.
The withdrawal amounts to a kind of “peace dividend” for state law enforcement officers after years of border chaos.
Operation Lone Star still exists but has shifted to the Texas interior, working crime related to the border, Lt. Chris Olivarez, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, acknowledged.
“We’re just repositioning troopers now away from the river because lot fewer people coming across,” Olivarez said. “There are more soldiers, national guard, and more infrastructure, but a lot less crossings, so we’re going back to traditional criminal interdiction work. If something were to happen, we can scale back up quickly.”
They’ve also repositioned to help US Immigration and Customs Enforcement hunt down criminal aliens in Texas cities, Olivarez said. DPS air and boat units remain on patrol, albeit scaled to align with illegal crossing levels.
All this reflects a dramatic sea change since March 2021, when Gov. Abbott ordered thousands of state troopers and Texas National Guard to fill gaps on the line created when the Biden administration decided to accept most illegal border crossers into the country and ordered US Border Patrol off the line to staff “processing center” duties to do their paperwork.
But the crossing numbers and new White House orders for Border Patrol to return to normal duty argued for a reprieve.
From California to Texas, Southwest border encounters between ports of entry in the brush fell from 140,641 in February 2024 (large percentages of those processed by Border Patrol for release into the US interior) to 8,347 in February 2025 (almost all detained, deported, or referred for illegal entry prosecutions).
In Texas, the number fell from 53,460 mostly admitted a year ago to 5,016, a US Customs and Border Protection website shows, almost all deported.
In Juarez recently, many recently aspiring illegal border crossers said they won’t dare try a crossing now because they’d get caught, deported, or prosecuted on the US side.
They also complained that smuggling fees had skyrocketed due to the much higher risk that local smugglers would go to prison if caught.
“The border is a problem,” said a former Venezuelan soldier named Angel while working as a shopping center parking lot attendant in Juarez, earning $100 per week.
He’d arrived two months earlier hoping to enter on a temporary “humanitarian” parole program the Biden administration ran on a phone app called CBP One.
But Trump cancelled the entry program, leaving Angel and thousands like him stranded behind a just-slammed gate.
“The people I know who crossed illegally got caught and immediately deported” to far southern Mexico by air,” he said.
An illegal crossing is out of the question for him because the “mafia” coyote smugglers will charge between $2,000 and $2,500 and then leaves people alone without a guide on the Texas side.
“Then the Americans take you and send you back, and you lose the money,” Angel said. “I’m not going to risk my money and my life.” Angel plans to settle in Mexico for a few years.
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