THE TEXAS BORDER COUNTY AT THE CENTER OF A DANGEROUS RIGHT-WING EXPERIMENT – By Melissa del Bosque (The Intercept) / Oct 12, 2022
Officials in rural Kinney County, Texas, are pushing Gov. Greg Abbott to take ever more extreme action against migrants and asylum-seekers.
CAROLEA HASSARD, a rancher in rural Kinney County, Texas, population 3,100, received a jury summons in April. “They called more than 175 of us for a six-member jury selection,” she said. “I felt like I was in a murder trial. But this was for a misdemeanor trespassing case.”
The trial was for an undocumented Honduran man who had crossed the border into Kinney County, 120 miles west of San Antonio. He was being prosecuted for trespassing on private ranchland by the county attorney, Brent Smith, a major proponent of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which seeks to bypass the federal immigration system by detaining asylum-seekers and migrants on low-level state trespassing charges.
In the end, Hassard wasn’t chosen for the jury. She lost half a day’s work plus gas since it was an hourlong trip to the county courthouse and back. “It was really a waste of time,” she said. “Calling 175 people for a misdemeanor jury is going overboard.”
Like other residents in the border county, Hassard said she’s grown tired of Operation Lone Star and fearmongering by local elected officials like Smith, who paint the region as being under invasion. Over the last year, the formerly quiet ranching community has become a backdrop for Fox News and far-right media to promote the idea that states can declare an invasion under the U.S. Constitution and use force against migrants seeking refuge as if they were a hostile foreign power.
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2022/10/12/kinney-county-texas-operation-lone-star/
