AI Generated Image (not the actual Texas proclamation)
The legal backbone of Texas’s border mission is a disaster declaration that lapses every 30 days unless the governor signs it again, and in January that pen passes to a Democrat who has called the operation “political theatre.”
Operation Lone Star, the state border program Gov. Greg Abbott launched in March 2021, now depends on a decision Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa can make alone: whether to keep renewing the border security disaster proclamation that gives it much of its legal force. Hinojosa has called for “a review of Operation Lone Star,” The Texas Tribune reported on Nov. 6, but neither she nor Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson has committed to dismantling it. The answer will matter to border landowners and residents, to the roughly 1,000 people with Lone Star cases still pending in state courts, to the Guard members and troopers deployed under it, and to the local agencies that live on its grants.
The question is urgent because the program’s original justification has largely disappeared. Border Patrol agents made 98,708 arrests at the southwest border in fiscal 2026 (October 2025 through September 2026), according to a DHS release dated Oct. 16. That works out to about 8,200 a month, based on the DHS figure, against more than 180,000 in a single month around the time Abbott first declared the emergency in 2021, as the Tribune and ProPublica reported in October. Yet Abbott has renewed or amended the proclamation at least 69 times, 21 of them during President Trump’s current term, according to that joint investigation.
- Total cost: about $11 billion so far, the Tribune reported, with nearly $3.4 billion for border security in the current two-year state budget.
- Border barrier: about 82.2 miles built, per the Texas Facilities Commission as cited by the Tribune, from a $3.1 billion appropriation.
- Prosecutions: the defense group Lone Star Defenders has represented about 20,000 people arrested under the operation, and about 1,000 cases remain pending, according to the Tribune.
How Operation Lone Star runs on a monthly signature
Under the Texas Disaster Act, Chapter 418 of the Government Code, a state of disaster cannot last more than 30 days unless the governor renews it. In the border declaration, that power has meant deploying the Guard, moving money between agencies, building barriers and awarding no-bid contracts without going back to the Legislature, according to the Tribune and ProPublica, which counted more than $5 million in such contracts since January 2025.
That design cuts both ways. Kristin Etter of the Texas Immigration Law Council told the Tribune that Hinojosa could simply stop renewing the proclamation, ending the expanded powers without a vote. The timing gives Abbott the last word for a few more weeks, though. The most recent renewal described by the Tribune was dated Sept. 14. If that monthly rhythm holds, an Abbott renewal in mid-January would carry the declaration into Hinojosa’s first weeks after her Jan. 19 inauguration, making her first real choice a February one.
Abbott’s office has defended the renewals. “The damage caused by four years of failed border policies under Democrat rule did not disappear overnight,” Deputy Press Secretary Madeline Waschak told the Tribune and ProPublica. Hinojosa has said the program “needs to only exist to make us safer,” according to the Tribune.
What a new governor cannot switch off
Letting the declaration lapse would not repeal anything the Legislature wrote. Senate Bill 4 of 2023, which makes illegal entry a state crime and lets a judge order a convicted person to leave the country, is a statute, and the Fifth Circuit ruled this spring that Texas can enforce it while litigation continues, the Tribune reported. The separate 2017 anti-sanctuary law, also known as SB 4, still binds cities, which is why Houston’s new limits on ICE calls are a legal test and Austin is waiting for January. Border money is also the Legislature’s call. Funding beyond the current budget must be renewed in the session that opens in January, with a Democratic-controlled House, according to the Tribune.
The governor does control the grants local officials feel most directly: nearly $230 million last year, largely to prosecutors and agencies supporting the operation, the Tribune and ProPublica reported. The likelier path is a quiet one, with fewer grants, narrower deployments and fewer trespass arrests rather than a formal shutdown. Amrutha Jindal of Lone Star Defenders put the risk plainly to the Tribune: the program “could end in name, but it wouldn’t end in practice.”
None of this touches federal enforcement. ICE and the Border Patrol act under federal law, as ICE’s Lone Star Mission sweep across Texas showed, and the same handover is already clouding the state’s H-1B freeze. The markers to watch are Abbott’s December and January renewals, Hinojosa’s first proclamation decision, the House budget and the Fifth Circuit’s SB 4 ruling.
This article is for general information and is not legal advice.
Sources
- The Texas Tribune: What happens to Operation Lone Star when Democrats take over (Nov. 6, 2026)
- The Texas Tribune and ProPublica: Abbott keeps renewing border emergency order despite drop in crossings (Oct. 15, 2026)
- DHS: Fiscal 2026 southwest border arrest totals (Oct. 16, 2026)
- Texas Government Code, Chapter 418 (Texas Disaster Act)
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