Did an Operation Lone Star Contractor Fly Tennessee’s Governor to Eagle Pass?

Flight records indicate one of the governors at a Texas press event may have flown there on a private jet owned by a major border contractor, whose CEO is also an Abbott donor.

Above: Private jets at the Maverick County airport, as shared on X by Poncho Nevárez.

On Sunday, 13 Republican governors flocked to Eagle Pass to stand in support of Governor Greg Abbott’s border security showdown with the feds. It appears one of them may have hitched a ride on a private jet owned by an Austin contractor that has cashed in on the taxpayer windfall generated by Operation Lone Star.

Early Sunday morning, a private plane owned by Gothams LLC flew from Austin-Bergstrom Airport to Nashville—where Tennessee Governor Bill Lee resides—and then flew down to Maverick County’s airport, touching down just before noon, according to the flight tracking website Flightaware. Governor Lee was among the attendees of Abbott’s Eagle Pass border event, which included a state police briefing and a press conference that began shortly before 3 p.m.

Abbott staged the event at the public park right on the border in Eagle Pass that the state has commandeered as part of an escalating standoff with the Biden Administration and federal border agents. “As opposed to detaining illegal immigrants, Biden has let them all loose, with no ability to accurately determine their whereabouts,” Abbott declared on Sunday. “We’ve seen the catastrophic consequences of Joe Biden’s open border policy.”

It’s also become another source of pay-to-play politics. Since launching his Operation Lone Star in 2021, the sprawling border operation has been funded with several billion dollars in state taxpayer funds—a large part of which have gone to private contractors hired to help run the immigration enforcement regime.

Texas awarded Gothams a $43 million purchase order to build and operate the facility back in 2021. The state’s contract bidding requirements have been suspended under Abbott’s border disaster declaration. Last August, the state extended Gothams’ operations of the Jim Hogg facility for 2024 at an estimated total cost of $26 million, according to purchase order records.

Michelsen has returned the favor to Abbott, giving a total of $350,000 to the governor’s campaign in 2022 and 2023, campaign finance records show. On top of that, he gave $100,000 in November to the Republican State Leadership Committee’s Texas PAC, which funds GOP state legislative races. Gothams also gave $25,000 to the governor’s inauguration ceremony committee last January.