Gov. Kim Reynolds announced on Wednesday that she is deploying 109 members of the Iowa National Guard to Texas, along with officers of the Iowa State Patrol, to assist Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s state-level border control program, Operation Lone Star.
“The deployment will last until Sept. 1, 2023, with the mission of deterring illegal border crossings and preventing the trafficking of illegal substances by cartels through Texas,” the governor’s office said in a written statement.
The statement quotes Reynolds as saying the deployments are necessary because the “Biden Administration has failed to respond to the crisis at the border” and “our country has experienced a historic rise in illegal immigrants and illicit drugs entering our country.”
Data from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) published last month shows a sharp decline in people illegally crossing the border from Mexico. CBP statistics showed a 72 percent drop in illegal border crossing between May and July, reaching the lowest number of such crossings since early 2021.
Gov. Abbott’s border actions have attracted renewed attention lately after a Texas state trooper reported that he and his fellow officer had been ordered not to provide water to border crossers suffering from the extreme heat of south Texas, and to push migrants back into the Rio Grande.
“In one account, Texas Trooper Nicholas Wingate told a supervisor that upon encountering a group of 120 migrants on June 25 — including young children and mothers nursing babies — in Maverick County, a rural Texas border county, he and another trooper were ordered to “push the people back into the water to go to Mexico,” the Associated Press reported three weeks ago.
There were also reports of people severely injured by razor-wire barriers Abbott had ordered erected at crossing points from Mexico. Abbott has also had a 1,000-foot-long floating barrier of wrecking ball-sized buoys placed in the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas, in violation of international treaties with Mexico. Two dead bodies have been recovered from the barrier since it was installed in June as part of Operation Lone Star.
The Biden administration ordered Abbott to remove the barrier, which often drifts into Mexico’s section of the river, calling it a hazard to human life and the environment, as well as an illegal encroachment on federal border control. Abbott has refused. The U.S. Justice Department is now suing Texas to have the barrier removed.
If the name Operation Lone Star sounds familiar to Iowans, that’s because Gov. Reynolds sent 28 Iowa State Patrol officers to participate in Abbott’s border operation in 2021. At the time, both governors boasted about the success of Operation Lone Star.
But an in-depth investigation by ProPublica, the Texas Tribune and the Marshall Project published last year found that claims about the effectiveness of Operation Lone Star by Abbott and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) were “based on shifting metrics that included crimes with no connection to the border, work conducted by troopers stationed in targeted counties prior to the operation, and arrest and drug seizure efforts that do not clearly distinguish DPS’s role from that of other agencies.”
The 10-day deployment of 28 troopers to the Del Rio area of Texas cost the state of Iowa approximately $300,000. In its message on Wednesday, the governor’s office said state funds would not be used this time.
“All costs will be covered by federal funding allocated to Iowa from the American Rescue Plan,” the statement said. “States are given flexibility in how this funding can be used provided it supports the provision of government services.”
It was an unusual inclusion in an official statement from Reynolds’ office, because the governor seldom gives credit to the federal government as she uses its money for projects she claims as her own. And while it is true that money awarded to states through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) can be used a various ways, it is supposed to help make sure state and local governments have “the resources needed to respond to the pandemic and its economic effects and to build a stronger, more equitable economy during the recovery.”
In January 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department released its final rule on how ARPA funds can be spent. The rule, which took effect on April 1, 2022, focused on four areas of spending that are permitted: capital expenditures, expanding public sector hiring and capacity, premium pay for essential works and broadening eligible broadband, water and sewer infrastructure. The 487-page document addressing acceptable and unacceptable use of the funds never addresses any matters related to the National Guard or if a state can use the money for out-of-state deployments. The references it contains for spending on law enforcement are largely about using the money to create community policing programs and public safety alternatives to the use of police. The use of ARPA money to send Iowa personnel to support something like Operation Lone Star does not appear to be covered.
If it is determined that Gov. Reynolds has misspent ARPA funds, the Treasury Department will require the money to be refunded. It would not be the first time the governor has had to repay pandemic-related federal funds after the Treasury Department determined she had misspent them. In December 2020, Reynolds had to return $21 million in federal funds she had misappropriated from the state’s Coronavirus Relief Fund.
This story originally appeared in LV Daily, Little Village’s Monday-Friday email newsletter. Sign up to have it delivered for free to your inbox.
