EXCLUSIVE: Texas Operation Lone Star 2.0: pursuing domestic terrorist threats

By Bethany Blankley
The Center Square

The border crisis is far from over despite the Trump administration implementing policies to reduce illegal border crossings to historic lows.

The hardest part has just begun: finding millions of criminal foreign nationals, including those on the terrorist watchlist and Special Interest Aliens (SIAs), released into the country by the Biden administration. They are believed to be among a minimum two million gotaways who illegally entered between ports of entry to evade capture, law enforcement officials have explained to The Center Square.

In Texas, Department of Public Safety law enforcement officers working with local and federal partners through Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security mission, Operation Lone Star, are on the front lines pursing domestic terrorist threats.

They are continuing to arrest gotaways, tracking them in rural areas using brush teams, mounted and K9 units, dismantle stash houses and human smuggling operations and engaging in high-speed pursuits in border communities, The Center Square reported.

Since Gov. Abbott launched OLS in March 2021, DPS OLS officers have apprehended or referred to Border Patrol more than 536,929 illegal border crossers. They’ve made more than 60,529 criminal arrests, with more than 49,280 felony charges reported, according to the latest data obtained by The Center Square.

They’ve also seized more than 841 million lethal doses of fentanyl – enough to kill the entire populations of Canada, Mexico and the United States, according to the data.

Now under “OLS 2.0”, DPS OLS operations are extending “into the interior of the state, where we work closely with federal law enforcement to disrupt transnational criminal organizations and the networks responsible for smuggling operations and threats to public safety,” DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez told The Center Square in an exclusive interview. They’re also apprehending numerous SIAs “who would have otherwise escaped into the interior of the U.S. had OLS officers not arrested them.”

OLS DPS personnel “are on the front lines every day – from river operations to criminal interdiction – stopping human smuggling, drug smuggling, and seizing fentanyl and other dangerous drugs before they reach Texas neighborhoods,” he said.

SIAs they’ve arrested are male citizens from countries of foreign concern, including Iran, a U.S. State Department designated State Sponsor of Terrorism. The male SIAs are also from Afghanistan, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of Mali, Syria and Turkey, among others, The Center Square reported.

In one case, OLS officers pulled over a driver in a border community and found a Syrian hiding in the trunk of the vehicle. In other cases, they caught Afghans, Iranians and other SIAs trespassing on private ranches in border communities.

The Iranians came through Mexico with plans to go to Florida, Las Vegas and San Francisco, they told OLS officers, The Center Square reported. Instead, they were arrested.

SIAs are noncitizens who, based “on an analysis of travel patterns,” are “known or evaluated to possibly have a nexus to terrorism” who “potentially poses a national security risk to the United States,” according to the Department of Homeland Security. At least 73,000 SIAs were arrested under the Biden administration, a U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security reported last year. The number excludes gotaways.

Understanding the threat, the Texas legislature created a new Department of Homeland Security within DPS and allocated funding for technology and other resources to continue OLS operations. The new division is providing intelligence support to “help us identify and combat domestic terrorism and threats to life” and taking “proactive action to combat domestic terrorism, transnational criminal activity, and the growing threat posed by SIAs.

“Today, we face more threats than ever before,” he said.

Within a few months of being operational, the new division has helped take down a Tren de Aragua foreign terrorist organization operation in San Antonio, located and arrested an Afghan making terroristic threats in Fort Worth and is investigating extensive alleged statewide Islamic terrorist threats, The Center Square reported.

The new division is also spearheading intelligence and surveillance, including managing Operation Drawbridge, “the program for the installation and monitoring of cameras and surveillance equipment along the Texas-Mexico border.”

OLS DPS officers are making roughly 100 criminal arrests along the Texas-Mexico border every week, “roughly the same as one year ago, as the criminal element crossing the border remains,” Olivarez said. “While our border is overall more secure today than it has been in years, the work of OLS is not yet complete.”

DPS South and West Region troopers are searching for human smugglers; brush teams are searching for camouflaged gotaways. All six DPS regions are searching for criminal foreign nationals many miles from the physical border.

So far, they’ve identified roughly 6,500 criminal foreign nationals with active felony warrants for a range of offenses, including murder, assault, sex crimes, human smuggling, drug and weapons among others.

Several have been added to Texas’ 10 Most Wanted Criminal Illegal Immigrants List, which was created in June 2024. This year, 13 were found and taken into custody, DPS said.