A RED CAR weaves in and out of traffic on a highway in El Paso, Texas. It’s June 2022 and Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers are in hot pursuit. They are chasing someone they suspect of smuggling migrants across the southern border. The high-speed pursuit, which reaches 100mph (160kph), eventually runs parallel to the border wall. As the troopers drive closer they seem to hit the car. It flips and lands upside down. One passenger flies through a window; the others crawl out. The DPS radio traffic is mostly unintelligible except for one word. “Shit.”
The dash-cam video of the chase was revealed by public-information requests from KTEP, El Paso’s public-radio station. Rather than being a one-off, the pursuit fits a dangerous pattern. As Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, has ramped up Operation Lone Star, an $11bn (and counting) border-security initiative, residents of El Paso have watched their roads become more dangerous. Officials in Texas’s biggest border city are careful to say that they understand the need to go after smugglers. For several months during President Joe Biden’s administration Border Patrol apprehended more migrants near El Paso than on any other part of the frontier. But evidence suggests that DPS chases are overly aggressive and sometimes deadly—the result of a pursuit policy that is reckless compared with other law-enforcement agencies.
“Operation Lone Star never really touched El Paso until the last couple years. It was always more of a south Texas thing,” explains Dylan Corbett of the Hope Border Institute, an advocacy group. When the number of migrants crossing the border increased in 2022, the mayor declared a state of emergency, which allowed the city to qualify for additional funds under Operation Lone Star. El Pasoans say troopers then fanned out around the city.
An investigation commissioned by the county attorney found that DPS chases increased more than seven-fold between 2022 and 2023, to nearly 400 pursuits. Half of chases since 2018 reached speeds of over 100mph. An analysis of DPS records by KTEP suggests that roughly a quarter of chases in the first nine months of 2024 ended in a crash. Human Rights Watch, an NGO, totted up incidents from state data and news reports and found that DPS chases contributed to at least 106 deaths and 301 injuries in counties participating in Operation Lone Star since 2021.
Criminologists say state troopers, and DPS in particular, are notorious for their lax pursuit policies. The Police Executive Research Forum suggests always considering alternatives to chases, limiting the times when pursuits are warranted, and giving supervisors—rather than officers—the power to decide when a chase should end. DPS bucks all of these guidelines. “They just do things that are basically taken from the wild, wild west,” says Geoffrey Alpert of the University of South Carolina. “The problem is, in the wild wild west, a horse couldn’t really hurt you.”
While El Pasoans lobby for a stricter policy in Texas, politicians elsewhere who are under pressure to prove their law-and-order bona fides want to loosen things up. “We’re not seeing the pendulum swinging back yet, but it’s kind of teetering,” admits Mr Alpert. The federal government is rediscovering its need for speed. In 2023 Customs and Border Protection issued a new policy limiting when agents could rush after suspects. President Donald Trump rescinded it. ■
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