Operation Lone Star ... Decrease in Violent Crime Index?
by Serena Oh
On May 31, 2021, Governor Greg Abbott issued a statewide disaster proclamation in response to the increase in individuals crossing the Texas-Mexico border. Soon after, he launched one of the largest state-led border enforcement operations in modern U.S. history: Operation Lone Star (OLS). The initiative “deputized the Texas National Guard, deployed the Texas Tactical Border Force to work side-by-side U.S. Border Patrol agents, and directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to deploy tactical strike teams to arrest criminal illegal immigrants”. By doing so, OLS asserts that this will protect Texans, promising that these arrests and prosecutions will increase public safety and act as a deterrent to other potential lawbreakers.
Since OLS promises to improve public safety, the violent crime index (murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault) is a clear place to look for a measurable impact. This leads to the main question: Does Operation Lone Star correlate with the violent crime index in the border counties in Abbott’s disaster proclamation?
Supporters of Operation Lone Star argue that it is necessary for the overall safety of Texans, pointing to arrests of individuals they describe as dangerous or involved in organized crime. Critics, however, question whether Operation Lone Star has accomplished anything beyond “arresting people and making them criminals.” A report from state law enforcement and court data, ranging from March 2021 to January 2024, claimed that “OLS fails to improve actual public safety”.
Regardless of supportive or critical opinions, examining the violent crime index data will cut through these competing claims. When comprehending the data, it is important to note that Texas border counties start from different baselines. Urban border counties tend to have higher violent crime numbers because of their large population. Suburban counties fall somewhere in the middle, while rural counties have a much lower violent crime rate due to their very low population count. With these baseline differences in mind, the following analyzes the violent crime rate before and after the launch of Operation Lone Star to determine whether there is a correlation between the two.
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After analyzing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Records Services, there does not appear to be a clear correlation between Operation Lone Star activity and violent crime rates. Image 1, presented below, shows the violent crime rate in urban, suburban, and rural border counties before and after the start of Operation Lone Star.
Upon closer inspection by region, as shown in Image 2 below, it becomes clearer that there is no consistent relationship between violent crime rates and Operation Lone Star.
For example, in the Texas border urban region, a pre-existing downward trend in the violent crime rate was observed from 2017 to 2021, not a sudden drop caused by OLS. But, after 2021, violent crime rates rose from 2021 to 2023, then decreased from 2023 to 2024. In the Texas border suburban region, there was a slight decrease in violent crime from 2020 to 2021, followed by a steady increase in violent crime rates from 2021 to 2024. Although there is some variability, there is no strong direction supporting a change in the violent crime rates due to OLS. For the Texas border rural region, the violent crime rate is extremely low overall, and thus is not meaningful enough to claim any strong correlation between OLS and the index violent crime rate.
Taken together, the evidence from these datasets does not show a consistent positive or negative correlation between OLS and violent crime rates. Thus, the data suggest that to increase the protection of Texans and decrease the violent crime index, Operation Lone Star may not be the best solution. The data serves as an encouragement to policymakers of Texas to consider additional strategies for improving public safety, particularly those focused on local factors that research consistently associates with the violent crime rate.
In response to the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of Operation Lone Star in enhancing public safety, many scholars have proposed alternative solutions. Many criminologists and policy analysts reject that immigrants are a primary source of violent crime. Instead, they suggest shifting focus to hotspots of crime rather than border security. Criminologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio, including Brandon Tregle and Michael R. Smith, found that the most effective crime-reduction strategy is not broad resource-intensive operations, but rather “hot-spot policing”, using data-driven strategies to reduce violent crime in target areas. By honing in on hotspots, this would allow for a more efficient way to curb index violent crime than blanket military enforcement.
Ensuring that Texans are best protected should be at the forefront of our policymakers’ decisions. While Operation Lone Star is not the most effective approach in this regard, it does highlight the importance of exploring additional strategies to reduce violent crime more effectively. Evidence-based and data-driven approaches should be seriously considered so that Texas can allocate resources more effectively to improve public safety and decrease violent crime.
