TX governor says Operation Lone Star stops terrorists & drugs. Does the data back it up?

In Reality Check stories, Star-Telegram journalists dig deeper into questions over facts, consequences and accountability. Read more. Story idea? RealityCheck@star-telegram.com.

Operation Lone Star has seized hundreds of millions of “lethal doses of fentanyl” and apprehended hundreds of known terrorists, according to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

“Since the launch of Operation Lone Star, the amount of fentanyl seized is almost incomprehensible,” he told members of the Sheriff’s Association of Texas during the organization’s Annual Training Conference at the Fort Worth Convention Center on Tuesday.

“We have apprehended more than half a million illegal immigrants and seized enough fentanyl to kill far more than every man, woman and child in the United States of America,” he said.

“More than a half a million — I’m sorry, I said half a million — more than a half a billion lethal doses have been seized,” he said.

His speech received several rounds of applause from those in attendance. Sheriffs of border counties who spoke with The Star-Telegram afterward said their counties had benefited greatly from the collaborative initiative.

Launched in March 2021, Abbott’s Operation Lone Star is a collaborative effort between the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety.

However, such claims of the operation’s success against drug smugglers are “specious,” according to Aron Thorn, a senior attorney in the Beyond Borders Program at the Texas Civil Rights Project .

“The vast majority of fentanyl is caught at ports of entry,” he said, adding that it is not correct to credit Operation Lone Star for fentanyl seized in the interior of the country.

Thorn cited data from the right-leaning Cato Institute that show that fentanyl is largely smuggled into the United States by and for U.S. citizens, not asylum seekers.

Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows migrants are not bringing fentanyl across the border .

Thorn also noted that the governor’s office was found at the beginning of Operation Lone Star to take data from local law enforcement agencies to back up its claims of drug seizures.

A March 2022 investigation by The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and The Marshall Project found that the evidence does not support claims of Operation Lone Star’s touted results.

The investigation found that the statistics included arrests of U.S. citizens that occurred hundreds of miles from the U.S.-Mexico border and arrests for crimes not related to illegal entry or drug trafficking — crimes like sexual assault, stalking and cockfighting. They also included drug seizures by DPS troopers stationed before the initiative was launched.

“It’s really difficult to do a one-to-one analysis to really justify these things,” Thorn said.

Border county sheriffs who spoke with The Star-Telegram on Tuesday, however, did not hesitate to credit Operation Lone Star with increased law enforcement capabilities.

Sheriff Tom Schmerber of Maverick County, where Eagle Pass is located, said his department would be “lost” without the money it got from Operation Lone Star.

In January, Abbott sent Texas National Guard troops to occupy and fortify a park in Eagle Pass with shipping containers and razor wire.

“When the governor sent the troopers to my county, that was a lot of help,” Schmerber said.

But while the resources may have helped control the historic numbers of migrants crossing into the United States in the area at the time, Schmerber couldn’t say that his deputies were seizing large quantities of fentanyl.

Sheriff Raymundo Del Bosque of Zapata County, about 120 miles south of Maverick County, said Operation Lone Star resources helped bring both illegal crossings and drug trafficking under control there.

He agreed with the governor’s notion that migrants are bringing fentanyl into the country.

“A lot of these people, unfortunately, they have families still in Mexico, so these people are pressured by the cartel to cross illegal drugs in order for them not to do anything to their families,” he said. “It’s just the way of the beast.”

Abbott also said that terrorists can “simply walk across the border” and that Operation Lone Star has caught hundreds of people on the terrorist watch list.

“If we have apprehended hundreds of known terrorists in just the past three years, how many unknown terrorists have been able to make it across the border undetected?” he said.

The U.S. government’s terrorist watch list topped 2 million people in December 2023.

“There just is no evidence that there are any terrorism suspects entering the United States across the border,” said Denise Gilman, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at UT Austin .

A “very, very few” number of people on terrorist watch lists may have entered through the border, but those lists are “deeply problematic,” she said.

The Department of Homeland Security has said that 98% of the names on that list were “false positives” who were put on it because of similarities of their names to others in the database.

A Cato Institute report from April called claims of terrorists crossing the border a “manufactured crisis.”