Soldiers Confronting Migrants: Texas’s Dangerous Precedent

Since March 2021 the state government of Texas, under Gov. Greg Abbott (R), has carried out “Operation Lone Star” (OLS), a crackdown on migration along the state’s border with Mexico. While this operation’s political, financial, and legal aspects have received much attention, an equally alarming issue has been relatively overlooked: the use of excessive force by Texas police and national guardsmen against civilians at the borderline.

Actions committed along the Rio Grande, which range from firing projectiles at unarmed migrants to physically pushing them back across the border, violate nearly any democratic law enforcement agency’s standards and set a dangerous precedent for civil-military relations on U.S. soil.

Abbott and officials carrying out OLS label migrants—many of them children, families, and asylum seekers—as “invaders” against whom Texas must defend itself. At a cost of more than $11 billion in state funds, OLS has deployed thousands of state police and national guardsmen, whose current numbers are undisclosed.  This operation has resulted in:

• The deaths of 17 National Guard members, including at least four deaths by suicide, traffic accidents, an accidental shooting, and medical emergencies.
• More than 46,000 arrests of migrants and asylum seekers, mainly on state trespassing charges, often leading to jail time and sometimes spurring family separations.
• Over 100 miles of razor-sharp concertina wire installed along the Rio Grande, injuring hundreds of migrants.
• Buoys with serrated metal discs placed in the middle of the Rio Grande.
• 119,400 migrants bused to Democratic-governed cities without coordination, at a cost of over $1,800 per passenger.
• Miles of new border wall built at state expense.

Despite these measures, OLS has not deterred migration to Texas, as compared to other border states.

A Troubling New Pattern of Force

WOLA is especially concerned about an element of OLS that has grown more troubling since mid-2023, especially in Eagle Pass and El Paso. Texan forces stationed on the banks of the Rio Grande—usually a few dozen yards in front of the federal border wall and the federal Border Patrol—have been using “less-than-lethal” force against unarmed migrants and asylum seekers even when there is no self-defense justification.

This behavior is unacceptable and dangerous. It carries great potential for human rights abuse. It ignores best practices for managing crowds and disturbances, unnecessarily escalating situations that need not be adversarial. And it represents a dangerous internal exercise of military force in a democracy.

Reported Incidents of Abuse

Reports of abuse by Texas law enforcement and National Guard under “Operation Lone Star” have included firing rubber bullets and pepper balls, beatings, and pushing people into concertina wire. Often, those targeted are on the Mexican side of the U.S. border, or barely on the U.S. side but separated from Texas forces by tall, layered coils of razor-sharp wire. Frequently, they are families with children and others seeking to turn themselves in to apply for protection in the United States. Notable cases include:

• On August 5, 2024 in Eagle Pass, local news outlets and video footage indicated that members of the Texas National Guard used tear gas against a group of Venezuelan migrants, including three children, after they crossed the Rio Grande. The video shows guardsmen firing projectiles at the family from behind the coils of concertina wire that separated them. “After the attack, the children began to cry and vomit,” local news reported.
• In August 2024, a representative of an El Paso migrant shelter reported having received guests who told of verbal and physical abuse of adults and minors committed by Texas forces along the borderline, including being cursed at, kicked, choked, hit with the butt of a rifle, and being recorded while forced to run as a humiliation tactic. They also reported the case of a Texas officer throwing a person’s phone into the river after attempting to record abusive behavior. Some officers remove or cover their name badges and hide their faces, making it difficult to identify perpetrators. 
• In late May 2024, a group of migrants encamped on the Ciudad Juárez side of the border, across from El Paso, told EFE that Texas personnel fired rubber bullets and pepper balls across the river at them, even while they slept. The migrants stated that nighttime attacks were the most common and aggressive. They displayed bruises and unruptured projectiles. In addition to aggressions with less-than-lethal weapons, the report added, the migrants cited constant verbal aggressions and the pointing of laser beams at their eyes.
• In early May 2024, Noticias Telemundo shared a video, taken from the Mexican side, of national guardsmen firing rubber bullets at migrants through the concertina-wire fencing. Some migrants yelled to the soldiers that children were present.
• On May 28, 2024, Border Report reported several incidents, among them:
  • “An unidentified Venezuelan man said two pepper balls struck him in the neck and side after he crossed the Rio Grande to plead with the soldiers to let families come across the razor wire.”
  • A Venezuelan mother and father told a videographer that they had “placed a piece of cardboard between two shrubs on the Mexican side of the river to protect their 1-year-old daughter from stray shots.”
  • A news photographer said that a guardsman shot at him twice while he was filming from the Mexican side. 
• In late May 2024, several local media outlets reported the death of a Honduran migrant, whose body was recovered on the Mexican bank of the Rio Grande in Ciudad Juárez. Other migrants alleged that the deceased man was severely beaten by members of the Texas National Guard, who prevented the group from crossing to the U.S. side to turn themselves in to U.S. federal authorities. They alleged that the guardsmen beat, pulled, and dragged other members of the group, including women and children.
  
  WOLA has been unable to verify this incident, which merits a transparent investigation by Texan and, if necessary, federal authorities. Should witnesses be on the Mexican side of the border, this investigation should count on collaboration from Mexican authorities. Months have passed: if their initial inquiries resulted in an investigation, state and federal authorities must inform the public whether it remains open and whether results will be forthcoming. Clarifying this should be an utmost priority because if accurate, it would be the first time in decades that a uniformed soldier or guardsman purposefully killed a civilian on U.S. soil.
• Hope Border Institute, an El Paso-based Catholic organization that maintains a health clinic in Ciudad Juárez, reported the following treatments of Operation Lone Star-related injuries in May and June 2024:
  • Eight people, including three children, with razor wire and concertina wire cuts.
  • 25 people, mostly men, injured by pepper and gas balls and rubber bullets shot by the Texas National Guard.
  • Two mothers and two children with intense psychological and emotional trauma after being separated from other family members at the Texas razor wire line.

• In February 2024, journalists reported Texas National Guard soldiers pushing migrants, including a woman with a baby, back across the Mexican border near El Paso while shouting profanities. When journalists recorded the incidents, guards changed their behavior but pointed lasers at journalists and their equipment.
• In a video published on October 3, 2023 by Al Jazeera, a Texas National Guard member in El Paso was seen standing over a prone man struggling to pass under concertina wire. The guard member taunted and abused the man, saying, “I have no mercy, animals” and stomping on the man’s hands.
• In July 2023 CBS News published an email from a Texas State trooper to his superiors in Eagle Pass, detailing several disturbing situations including the trooper finding a group of migrants, including children and nursing babies, camped along the U.S.-Mexico fence line and his shift officer ordered them to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico.” The email describes many migrants injured by the concertina wire, a woman suffering a miscarriage while tangled in the wire, and Texas troops’ denial of water to migrants, including children, in 100-degree heat.

Though not always occurring right at the borderline, it is important to note that Texas national guardsmen assigned to OLS have discharged weapons at civilians on three known occasions since the mission began:

• On January 13, 2023 near McAllen, Spc. Angel Gallegos shot migrant Ricardo Rodríguez Nieto in the shoulder with his pistol, wounding him. The guardsman claimed that the shooting happened during a scuffle, which Rodríguez Nieto and other migrants dispute.
• On August 26, 2023, a Texas National Guardsman stationed near the El Paso side of the Paso del Norte bridge fired a shot into Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, wounding the leg of a Mexican man on the opposite riverbank.
• In January 2022, a guardsman fired his rifle in Laredo to disable a vehicle whose driver had reportedly attempted to run over another guardsman.

Four Reasons for Federal Intervention

This situation is intolerable and raises significant human rights and civil rights issues. It requires the intervention of federal agencies with oversight responsibilities: the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the National Guard Bureau.

WOLA calls for federal intervention on several grounds.

1.Excessive Force Violates U.S. Law Enforcement Standards:  

No U.S. law enforcement agency has use-of-force guidelines that would allow firing projectiles at people who pose no imminent threat, unless their presence seriously violated the law and peaceful means had been exhausted.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal agency that includes Border Patrol, has a use-of-force policy requiring that a law enforcement officer (LEO) “has a reasonable belief that the subject of such force poses an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to the LEO or to another person.” Most U.S. state and local police departments adhere to a similar standard.

In all known cases involving Operation Lone Star at the borderline, the individuals targeted have been unarmed. In many cases, those targeted are on the other side of a difficult-to-penetrate, layered barrier of razor-sharp wire. In some cases, those targeted are not even on U.S. soil. They do not pose a threat of death or serious bodily injury and do not warrant anything near this level of force.

2. Pushbacks Violate International Law:

Merely being present on U.S. soil is not a crime meriting the use of force. If those present are expressing fear of return, it is illegal to push them back into Mexico.

Section 208 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which is based on U.S. commitments under the Refugee Convention, states clearly that people on U.S. soil have the right to apply for asylum if they fear return to their country—and that they have this right whether they arrived on U.S. soil at or between an official port of entry. That remains true even under the Biden administration’s June rule limiting asylum access between ports of entry (currently facing legal challenges), although people subject to the rule must now prove a higher standard of fear while being processed.

Turning away someone who requests protection is called “refoulement” and it is an international human rights violation. It is especially illegal to turn people away violently when they are unarmed and pose no threat of harm. The state of Texas is bound by this commitment and cannot make up its own human rights policy at the border.

3. Ignoring Best Practices for De-escalation:  

Law enforcement agencies in the United States and elsewhere have spent decades refining approaches to disturbances and crowd control. 

The most effective measures use violence only as a last resort and use a variety of de-escalation techniques before crossing the threshold into violence. What we’re seeing on the borderline in Texas appears to nearly completely ignore these lessons and best practices for de-escalating and avoiding confrontations.

4. Misuse of Military Personnel:

These incidents are troubling because those carrying out the alleged abuses are military personnel.

Under Title 32 of the U.S. Code, Texas national guardsmen are mobilized under Gov. Abbott’s command, not the federal government’s. Nonetheless, they are soldiers who receive the same Defense Department combat training and use much of the same equipment that regular, active military personnel do. Their uniforms bear patches that read “U.S. Army.”

It is very rare to see U.S. military personnel placed in a position where they might be compelled to use force on civilians on U.S. soil. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 makes it illegal except in emergency circumstances. Episodes like the 1970 Kent State massacre of student protesters had made leaders even more reluctant to use soldiers or guardsmen in this role. When presidents have called them to do so—the Los Angeles riots of 1992, for instance, or the 2020 George Floyd protests—military leaders have either sought to end the deployments as soon as possible or pushed back against civilian leaders, like Donald Trump, who ordered them.

The position in which Texas is placing military personnel—acting like police, in regular contact with a civilian population—should be a rare exception, both in the United States and in Latin America, where we see a similarly alarming trend of expanding internal military roles. Texas, however, plans to keep it in place for the foreseeable future: the state’s Military Department is asking its legislature for $2.3 billion to fund the National Guard’s participation in Operation Lone Star in 2026 and 2027.

A Dangerous Precedent for U.S. Civil-Military Relations

The OLS border deployment mission, with this many alarming incidents involving guardsmen and civilians, has no equal in the past 50 years. By placing troops in a civilian law-enforcement role, for this long and with such apparently loose guidelines, Texas is setting a terrible precedent for U.S. civil-military relations.

This requires the federal government to act. WOLA calls on the Justice Department to open an investigation of use-of-force violations committed by Texas personnel, especially its federally trained National Guard.

The Department has acted to rein in other Texas state government excesses at the border, like its installation of a “wall of buoys” in the Rio Grande and its passage of a law that would empower state authorities to arrest and deport people whom they regard to have crossed the border illegally. The behavior of Texas forces along the borderline rises to a similar standard of seriousness.

In making this call on the Department of Justice, we echo earlier calls for investigations from U.S. human rights defense groups. In December 2021, several organizations filed a complaint under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act calling on the Department to investigate Texas’s arrests of migrants based on racial profiling and biased policing. In June 2024, Human Rights Watch filed a complaint citing some of the use of force incidents we listed above, including the unresolved death of the Honduran man.

That these incidents involve soldiers under the command of a governor who conflates asylum seekers with “invaders” greatly amplifies the urgency of launching an investigation.

Since June, Fewer Migrants, and Fewer Incidents—but a Humanitarian Crisis in Nearby Desert

In recent months, use-of-force incidents at the Texas borderline have diminished along with a temporary decline in the overall migrant population. On June 4, 2024, the Biden administration imposed a proclamation and rule that made it harder for people who cross between ports of entry to access the U.S. asylum system. The number of people at the line between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso has plummeted, at least for now.

But as an August 2024 WOLA analysis warned, what has not plummeted is the number of migrants dying as they try to cross the border in Border Patrol’s El Paso Sector. Even amid a drop in migration, Border Patrol’s recoveries of migrant remains have already broken a sector record for fiscal 2024. A strong majority of those deaths have happened in the desert within 20 miles of El Paso, as documented by a No More Deaths mapping project. The causes are heat exhaustion and dehydration, along with some fatal falls from the border wall.

The Texas state government’s use of force is an urgent human rights concern, but it is far from the only cause of needless, preventable death and suffering at the borderline. The federal government’s insistence on “deterrence,” while keeping its asylum system starved of resources, bears much blame too, and the next U.S. administration needs to rethink it drastically.

We would like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Jocelyn Vasquez-Tax in the creation of this commentary