El Paso County Sheriff | Operation Stonegarden

Operation Stonegarden is the reason there is anything to write about surveillance in El Paso County’s own records. It is a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant, part of the Homeland Security Grant Program, administered in Texas through the Office of the Governor. It pays local law enforcement to run operations coordinated with the United States Border Patrol. El Paso County is the applicant and the fiduciary, the Sheriff’s Office is the operating agency, and the Commissioners Court signs the award, the interlocal agreement, the budget and every adjustment.

The sums are large for a county grant and steady. The awards whose stated period is twelve months, which is every one from FY2022 onward, run between $1,005,339 and $1,515,965. The earlier ones are larger totals spent over longer performance periods: the FY2011 award of $2,652,089.86 covers September 2011 to August 2014, and the amended FY2013 interlocal agreement runs to February 2015. No county match was required in any year we read.

Mostly it is overtime

The FY2014 budget is a useful one to look at because it has no equipment in it at all. The $2,323,001 award broke into $1,661,134.29 of operational overtime, $506,621.16 of fringe benefits, $104,972.91 of mileage and a county administration fee. The overtime is split across five police departments by name: the Sheriff’s Office, El Paso, Anthony, Horizon City and Socorro.

That is what the grant mostly does. It buys extra hours of patrol, in a county whose southern and western boundary is the international border and whose northern boundary is the New Mexico state line, worked in coordination with the Border Patrol station in whose area of responsibility the patrol falls.

Sometimes it is equipment, and that is where the cameras are

In some years the equipment line fills up, and when it does the detail is in a spreadsheet attached to the item rather than in the item’s title. The FY2018 budget carried $247,289.20 of it: laptops, binoculars, a video scope and a contraband detector for the El Paso Police Department, radios for Socorro, two fully equipped patrol vehicles for the Sheriff’s Office at $64,325 each, and under the heading Special Equipment, a license plate reader with software for the Anthony Police Department at $31,043 and four in-car plate reader renewal licenses for the Sheriff’s Office at $24,306.52.

The FY2020 budget carried $176,012.95, including four more plate reader licenses at $31,550, two handheld fingerprint processing units for the Anthony Police Department filed against the federal catalog code for an automated fingerprint identification system, and thermal imaging binoculars for Socorro. It also carried a radio consolette, which the Sheriff’s Office justified in the budget narrative on the grounds that it would remove the need to borrow handheld radios from the Border Patrol during Stonegarden operations.

The plate readers border money bought follows that equipment through the record.

What the arrangement asks of a local police department

The grant packets include an operations plan setting out what each participating agency will do. The FY2020 plan describes daytime and nighttime enhanced patrols, surges intended to gather intelligence, and a Border Patrol Station Integrated Planning Team that the local agencies sit on to identify deployment strategies. Under the heading for the Anthony Police Department, a town in the county’s north west corner, it says the department will support Border Patrol with plate reader operations.

That is the part worth sitting with. A municipal police department, accountable to a town council, running plate reader operations in support of a federal agency, under a plan a county Commissioners Court approved as a grant item.

The constables have their own

Texas constables are separately elected law enforcement officers with their own precincts and their own budgets, and in this county two of them have taken Stonegarden money directly: $113,247.76 to Precinct 6 for the twelve months from March 2022, $32,998 to Precinct 4 for the twelve months from March 2023. Each brings its own item to the Court.

What we have not read

The awards from FY2021 onward appear in the minutes as totals. The equipment schedules behind them sit in attachment packages this pass did not fetch, each averaging about fourteen megabytes. So if the county has bought a camera, a reader or an analytics subscription with border money since 2021, this page does not yet know about it.