Photo: Moment RF
As illegal border crossings continue to fall, thanks to efforts by President Trump, the Texas Supreme Court is allowing an order that provided for defense attorneys for undocumented immigrants to expire on May 1st.
This order was initially issued in 2021, as Operation Lone Star was starting to get underway. Brent Smith, county attorney for Kinney County, which shares a border with Mexico, explained, "The order set up the logistical hoops that you would need to go through, and the funding mechanisms to achieve those, under any Operation Lone Star grant."
This does leave open one major question: What happens to all that money that was being spent on these defense attorneys? Smith asked, "Is that money then going back to the counties to do that? That's going to be a really important aspect of this whole process, the funding mechanisms."
Smith says, thankfully, there is plenty of time before May 1st to sort out where all this money will go, and what the process of providing attorneys to any undocumented immigrants caught might end up looking like.
This is a great sign for border security. The fact that the Texas Supreme Court doesn't see the need to extend the order is a sign that illegal crossings are falling. Smith says that's in line with what he's seen in Kinney County. He said, "The arrests have gone down quite a bit, the traffic has gone down. The question is, is this slowdown of traffic going to be permanent? It's kind of hard to say what the traffic is going to do in the future, but currently right now, our traffic is much lower."
He says Texas should be working now to prepare for the possibility of a second border crisis in the future.