Actions committed along the Rio Grande, which range from firing projectiles at unarmed migrants to physically pushing them back across the border, violate nearly any democratic law enforcement agency’s standards and set a dangerous precedent for civil-military relations on U.S. soil.

Here’s a new commentary at WOLA’s website about an especially alarming part of what Texas’s state government is up to at the U.S.-Mexico border right now.

Since March 2021 the state government of Texas, under Gov. Greg Abbott (R), has carried out “Operation Lone Star” (OLS), a crackdown on migration along the state’s border with Mexico. While this operation’s political, financial, and legal aspects have received much attention, an equally alarming issue has been relatively overlooked: the use of excessive force by Texas police and national guardsmen against civilians at the borderline.

Actions committed along the Rio Grande, which range from firing projectiles at unarmed migrants to physically pushing them back across the border, violate nearly any democratic law enforcement agency’s standards and set a dangerous precedent for civil-military relations on U.S. soil.

We detail a series of often outrageous incidents involving Texas National Guard personnel at the borderline. We sound the alarms, and call for federal intervention, for four reasons:

  1. What’s happening goes way beyond virtually all U.S. law enforcement agencies’ use-of-force standards.
  2. It is illegal to push someone out of the country who is petitioning for asylum on U.S. soil.
  3. Texas is ignoring decades of lessons and policing best practices for managing crowds and de-escalating potential disturbances.
  4. When people whose uniform patches say “U.S. Army” on them violently confront civilians on U.S. soil, the precedent for U.S. civil-military relations is grave.

Read the whole thing here.