Border securityMost border arrests by Texas troopers are not for drug smuggling
Officers with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) have recorded 31,786 law violations along the Texas-Mexico border from late June 2014 through September 2016. Just 6 percent of the offenses were felony drug possession by “high-threat criminals,” or HTC — the criminals troopers were largely sent to stop. The other HTC priority is supposed to be human smugglers, but they made up just 1 percent of offenses. DPS has added more troopers to the border under the assumed objective that they are going after drug and human smugglers — but a close examination shows that most of their arrests are for drunk driving and misdemeanor drug possession.
When Nellie Mares and her husband moved here forty years ago, it was a place rooted in religion and filled with possibility for their children. Today, it is overrun with bail bondsmen, attorneys and an army of state troopers watching residents very closely.
“Well, sometimes it’s good,” Nellie said. “Sometimes, it’s not.”
Sitting on the couch with her son, Nickolas, 45, in the living room of their small, cinderblock home, Nellie recalled a night in April 2015 when the phone rang. A trooper had pulled Nickolas over on a stretch of road just north of the river separating their town from Mexico. Nickolas’ pickup truck had no front license plate.
“He couldn’t talk,” Nellie said of her son, who is unable to speak clearly because of a stroke he suffered a few years ago. “They called me to jail, and they were going to lock him up. I said, ‘Why are you going to lock him up?’”
In the dashcam video taken from the patrol car, the trooper asked Nickolas to step out of his truck and stand by the patrol car. He then searched the truck and discovered a small clear bag in the center console. The trooper returned to his vehicle and called another trooper.
“Hey, bro, I’ve got a dumb question for you man,” the first trooper said. “I’ve never gotten cocaine before, but I think I have a little bag here … [It is] wrapped real tight with white powder inside of it. I don’t know how to test it.”
Inside was less than a third of a gram of cocaine — enough for a felony drug charge.
“I couldn’t breathe,” Nellie recalls about the moment she learned the trooper had arrested her son. “Now I was the scared one.”
High-threat criminals
Nickolas was one of more than 3,781 arrestees along the border classified as “high-threat criminals,” or HTC, by the Texas Department of Public Safety since late June 2014. The department has defined an HTC as an individual “whose criminal activity poses a serious public safety or homeland security threat.”
The HTC list is part of lawmaker discussions on DPS funding, which is used in part to deploy troopers to the 63-county area closest to the border. In the last legislative session, DPS reported to lawmakers that the objective of its border efforts was “to decrease cartel drug and human smuggling by increasing patrol presence.”
