Galveston County Sheriff | Border security money on the Gulf coast

Operation Lone Star is the State of Texas’s border security program. Galveston County sits on the Gulf coast, and it has taken Operation Lone Star grants from the Office of the Governor since September 2021: $956,080 for FY2024, $1,418,183 for FY2025, with FY2026 and FY2027 accepted since. The Grants Administrator’s memos describe the work as support to “the counties on the Rio Grande border in their efforts to secure the border”.

Ten plate readers, under thermal imaging

In August 2023 the Court approved submitting a further application, for an Operation Lone Star Task Force of its own. Its budget detail includes an equipment line categorized as “Thermal Imaging Equipment” whose description reads: “TASK FORCE EQUIPMENT/SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS - TEN (10) Flock Safety Camera Systems to be installed at strategic locations throughout the county along major thoroughfares. The data gathered will be used by the intelligence analysts to locate and identify known human and drug traffickers.” The amount is $30,000.

That application was declined. On 29 December 2023 the Office of the Governor wrote that it “declines to fund your application at this time”, and the Court received and filed the notice four days later. The ten cameras were not bought with this money.

This is worth saying plainly, because an agenda item is not a purchase. A reader who found the application and stopped there would report ten border-funded plate readers on Galveston County highways that do not exist.

What border money did buy

In August 2025 the Office of the Governor amended the FY2025 award to add program equipment, and the Court received and filed the amendment on 2 September as consent item 34. Under the category “Specialty Camera and Accessories (e.g., video observation, pole cams, towers, etc.)” it adds “OLS STREET LIGHT SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS - Street light surveillance cameras bolster Operation Lone Star by providing continuous, real time monitoring in high traffic areas for illegal aliens.” Two cameras, at $2,500 each.

The same amendment adds $12,979 of camera bodies and long lenses, for what it describes as evidentiary documentation and real-time surveillance, with zoom that allows “discreet monitoring of remote areas”.

No county record we read says where the street light cameras went.

Border money also paid for something inside the jail. On 27 November 2023 the Court authorized the Purchasing Agent, on consent, to buy a LeoTech software packet for inmate communication monitoring for the Sheriff’s Office, through a purchasing cooperative rather than by competitive bid. The Sheriff’s Office letter filed with the item says the subscription was funded by the county’s Operation Lone Star grant. It is the one purchase in this county’s record where border security money demonstrably bought a surveillance capability, and no price appears in either letter. The motion that carried it approved items 1 to 43 and named no exceptions at all.

The reporting that comes with it

The grant’s conditions require the county to take part in planning and intelligence sharing meetings run by the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Joint Operations and Intelligence Centers, to join weekly unified command calls, and to submit Border Incident Assessment Reports covering events during both enhanced operations and ordinary steady state activity. None of those reports appears in the county’s record.

The one part that was argued about

Almost nothing in this county’s surveillance record drew a recorded No. Operation Lone Star is the exception. Of the twenty dissents in 573 votes across three years of minutes, five are about this program: covering continuation activities in October 2023, accepting the FY2024 award that December, submitting the FY2025 application in March 2024, a mutual aid agreement with Kinney County on the border in August 2024, and a budget transfer of Operation Lone Star money the same day. All five are Commissioner Stephen D. Holmes, and all five carried 4-1.

What a resident can ask for

The third request on this county’s list asks for the purchase orders and installation records for the street light cameras, and for the Border Incident Assessment Reports the county has filed since 2022.