High-speed police chases are taking place near the Texas border, putting locals on edge

Jairo Lerma and several of his relatives placed a wooden cross in the dry grass along a Texas highway where his parents, en route from Georgia to Mexico, were suddenly killed in a fiery crash with an oncoming car carrying migrants and fleeing was for a deputy sheriff. .

Shortly before the crash on November 8, his mother, Isabel, had texted to say that she and her husband, José Carlos, a retired carpet factory worker from Dalton, Georgia, would soon be at the border. Instead, they died near a bend in the road about 90 kilometers away, along with five migrants and the 21-year-old driver of the other car.

“I blame the police because they chased at a very high speed in a location that was really dangerous,” Mr Lerma said. “This could have been prevented.”

In recent years, police departments in the United States have reassessed when and how to pursue fleeing suspects and adopted policies to limit the number of dangerous high-speed chases.

But in Texas, state police and sheriff’s offices are notable exceptions, say police experts, who retain broad discretion to initiate pursuit when their officers see fit. The approach even differs from that of the state’s large city departments, such as Houston, where police have recently become active pursuits for minor offenses prohibited.

Chases across Texas have spiked starting in 2021, when Gov. Greg Abbott started a program known as Operation Lone Star and sent thousands of state troopers to patrol the area around the border.

The chases, which often erupt suddenly from traffic jams, have left dozens dead and dozens injured, including bystanders, roiling border communities from El Paso to Brownsville.

High-speed pursuits are part of Abbott’s aggressive approach to the surge in migrants arriving at the border, a strategy that has sparked clashes with the Biden administration. The federal government has investigated the actions of Texas police during Operation Lone Star, including their operations in areas where migrants drowned in the Rio Grande, although no broad action has been taken to curtail the program.

In Zavala County, where Mr.’s parents Lerma were murdered, residents have suffered a sharp increase in the number of chases. State police conducted at least 175 vehicle pursuits in Zavala County during the first two years of Operation Lone Star alone, according to department data. In the year before the border enforcement program, there were seven.

“It’s dangerous,” said Paul Rodriguez, who drives a roadside taco truck with his wife on U.S. Highway 57, where many chases have occurred. “It could just come straight to us, or to people buying food.”

The owner of a towing company that regularly does business transporting the wrecked vehicles used by fleeing migrant smugglers said he is advising his family not to drive on Highway 57. The mayor of Crystal City, the largest community in sparsely populated ranch Land County, said he avoids the road altogether after seeing the gnarled remains of chases.

“I have stopped using that highway,” Mayor Frank Moreno Jr. said. in an interview at city hall. “After all those years in the military, I don’t think something like that would happen to me.”

The state’s Department of Public Safety said 29 people were killed in troop pursuits in 2021 and 2022, the first two years of Operation Lone Star, about double the number in the previous two years. The figures do not include pursuits by other law enforcement agencies working with the state on Operation Lone Star, the department said.

a review of media reports by Human Rights Watch suggested that as of July 2023, more than 60 people had been killed in pursuits during Operation Lone Star. A report from the organization was expected on Monday.

The increase in deaths appeared to closely follow a rise in pursuits by state police. In counties along or near the border in South Texas, the number of pursuits has doubled from about 500 in 2019 to 1,100 in 2022. According to department data, there were about four times as many in those counties as in and around major cities like Dallas and Houston.

This year, the federal Customs and Border Protection Agency, whose agents have been involved in a number of deadly pursuits, has imposed new risk assessments and restrictions as part of its pursuit policy.

“It’s evolved quite dramatically,” said Travis Yates, a police trainer and retired major with the Tulsa Police Department. Thirty years ago, most departments pursued anyone who fled, he said. “You’re seeing a trend right now to give officers very strict parameters.”

Yet many departments continue to stick to the old approach of leaving this to the discretion of individual officers.

“State police are typically the biggest opponents of restricting pursuits,” said Geoffrey P. Alpert, a professor of criminology at the University of South Carolina who has long studied police pursuits. “Their job is traffic. That’s what they do. So if someone flees from them, it is an insult.”

He added that Texas State Police are “very aggressive” when it comes to pursuits.

Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, said in a telephone interview that the department relied on its troops to decide when to initiate a pursuit and when to call it off.

The department, he said, also uses a range of other tools to stop fleeing cars, including tracking helicopters overhead, placing “stop sticks” across the road or, if available, attaching a GPS tracker during a stop. (Such devices are mainly used in urban environments, a department official said.)

“I would say you can certainly mitigate the risks,” Mr. McCraw said. But by not pursuing it, he added, “you are only rewarding the Mexican cartels” in their smuggling efforts. He said he expected his troops to conduct the pursuit in a “judicious manner” and that they would be held accountable if they failed to exercise due caution.

“Frankly, I think this is a much better approach than capitulating to the cartels,” he said.

Mr. Abbott has credited Operation Lone Star with thousands of human smuggling arrests, often of U.S. citizens hired to expel migrants from border areas. A new law, which will come into force next year, increases the penalty for smuggling up to at least 10 years.

Many of the drivers are Texans recruited with the promise of quick money, said Sgt. Rogelio Lopez Jr., a deputy with the Zavala County Sheriff’s Office. “A lot of them are teenagers that we’re chasing,” he said in an interview during a recent predawn patrol.

The accident in which the parents of Mr. Lerma died is still under investigation. Chief Deputy Ricardo Rios said the policy of the Zavala County Sheriff’s Office was to rely on a deputy’s discretion, taking into account the location — whether in town or on the highway — and traffic on the road.

In September 2021, Gabriel Salazar, a 19-year-old from San Antonio with a significant following on social media, was killed along with three migrants in a crash while fleeing a traffic stop in Crystal City. A sheriff’s deputy used a tire deflation device before the crash. the department said.

Mr. Salazar was driving a white Chevrolet Camaro, which he had bought a few days earlier with his mother’s help, said his sister, Danna Salazar. “He was so excited when he got it,” she said. The family had tried to file a case against the police, whom they blamed for the crash, but were unable to find a lawyer to represent them, Ms. Salazar said. “He had a lot of goals,” she said of her brother. “He was trying to be a model.”

Zavala County, once an industrial producer of spinach, is not directly on the Rio Grande, but provides a connection between the border town of Eagle Pass and Interstate 35.

During his patrol, Sergeant Lopez pointed out places where migrants waited for a pickup along the highways: an abandoned house, now filled with discarded clothing and backpacks; a hiding place in the brush.

Behind the fences of a farm, an abandoned SUV that had been involved in an accident last year sat in a stand of mesquite trees, near roaring cattle.

“They went from the highway to here,” said Eddie Gomez, a ranch worker. He said migrants still regularly passed through the hunting ranch on foot, cutting the fence and occasionally allowing deer to escape.

According to residents, the number of chases seemed to decrease in recent months. Still, the fear of a sudden pursuit loomed large.

For the annual Spinach Festival in Crystal City — where a painted statue of Popeye from the 1930s stands prominently in front of City Hall — City Manager Felix Benavides said he had lined up police cars for protection in case a fleeing suspect crashed during the celebration.

“As city manager, that is my biggest concern,” Mr. Benavides said. “These are the problems we face in America.”