Houston Chronicle Editorial: Abbott’s most expensive campaign ad ever — billions in taxpayer money for Operation Lone Star

On a river levee in downtown Brownsville a formidable-looking Humvee faces an abandoned municipal golf course and a thick stand of trees shading the Rio Grande. A young Texas Army National Guardsman in crisp desert camouflage fatigues sits cross-legged atop the Army vehicle. A bright blue water jug within reach, he trains a pair of binoculars toward the river. Despite the battle array, he told us in a recent conversation that the only danger he might encounter during his daylong posting is either running out of water on a hot afternoon or dozing off from boredom and tumbling from his 6-foot-high perch. More than 450 miles to the northwest, a black-and-white Texas Department of Public Safety SUV idles beside one of the loneliest roads in the state. Looping northward from a dusty, little ghost town called Dryden, about a dozen miles north of the Mexican border, Texas 349 cuts through rugged range land and spectacular canyons toward a dried-up little oil-patch town called Sheffield. On a typical day, the DPS trooper monitoring the two-lane road might see a couple of pickups pass, maybe an oilfield truck. Normally, he would be patrolling busy Interstate 10 out of Ozona.

Both the DPS trooper and the guardsman are pawns in Gov. Greg Abbott’s multibillion-dollar border boondoggle — Operation Lone Star. Called to active duty in service to their campaign-obsessed governor, some 10,000 guardsmen have had to leave behind jobs and families to while away their time as part of the Abbott phalanx preventing Texas from being overrun by an imaginary invasion of the not-yet documented — many of them trying to legally request asylum. Reports of suicides and frustration bordering on despair have been the result. State troopers called from vital duties elsewhere are just as bored. From Brownsville upriver to Del Rio and alongside highways leading northward out of the Rio Grande Valley, the black-and-white SUVs are ubiquitous. With little else to do, some 1,600 troopers at any one time are either stopping motorists and truckers for broken-taillight-style traffic violations or they’re parked, often in pairs, every quarter mile or so. (Perhaps they’re conferring about how to beat the lunch-hour rush at the local Mexican restaurant.) It’s true, as the Dallas Morning News reported recently, that their boredom is salved to a degree by the huge amounts of overtime they’re amassing. We salute their good fortune, even though that’s our money they’re raking in, for no good reason.