This Article provides the first comprehensive empirical account of Operation Lone Star (OLS), Texas Governor Abbott’s immigration enforcement initiative at the southern border. Though OLS consists of several components, including border wall construction and the busing of migrants to “blue” states, the machinery of OLS is primarily designed to apprehend recent migrants and prosecute them for violations of Texas state criminal law. The most common OLS prosecutions are for misdemeanor criminal trespass after migrants are arrested on private ranch lands near the border. As many criminal justice reforms aim to shrink the scale and scope of the criminal legal system, OLS is actively engaged in its expansion.

Drawing upon hours of court observation, qualitative interviews with judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, and review of court documents from thousands of cases, this Article describes the processing of OLS cases in detail to see what lessons can be learned from the rollout of this large-scale state immigration enforcement program. What emerges is how different case processing is in OLS cases from the “normal” processing of criminal cases in Texas state courts. OLS uses tools from both civil immigration proceedings and federal border-related criminal prosecution programs—like Operation Streamline and Fast-track—to create a hybrid system that shares efficiencies and dysfunctions with each of its constituent parts. As one lawyer explained, OLS has created a “separate and distinct criminal justice system.” That separateness mitigates political and public resistance to this expansion of the carceral state and provides a roadmap for states looking for ways to scale up immigration enforcement and re-engage in the project of mass incarceration. The federal government has begun to use Texas’s plan as a blueprint for criminal immigration enforcement. OLS is a laboratory for experimentation in ways to expand the apparatus of the criminal legal system and presents an extreme version of the future, where meaningful rights to trial or appellate review cease to exist for marginalized populations charged with crimes.

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