The state quietly shuttered a jail booking facility in Val Verde County last summer that had operated as a hub of Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border crackdown, state officials acknowledged Tuesday.

Texas officials had opened two such sites for the governor’s border initiative, which surged Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and State Guard members to the more than 1,250 miles of border Texas shares with Mexico. Operation Lone Star was started early in the Biden administration in response to the White House’s immigration policies and continued as the number of illegal border crossings reached new highs.

At the facilities, officers booked asylum-seeking migrants on state charges of criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail, and human smuggling, a more serious felony that was largely leveled against thousands of young Americans.

Abbott credited President Donald Trump's return to the White House when he shut the first facility in Jim Hogg County last March. However, internal booking logs showed the reality was more nuanced, as the number of illegal border crossings had been decreasing for months before tanking further under Trump's second administration.

The closure of the facility in Val Verde, home to Del Rio, had not been previously reported or acknowledged by state officials until Tuesday. DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen confirmed the closure to The Texas Tribune in response to questions about internal records that suggested no one had been booked at the facility since May 2025.

Officials closed the Val Verde site in August 2025 after DPS officials began booking inmates into local jails that month, Nolen said.

“Thanks to increased collaboration at the state and federal levels over the last year, our border is now more secure than it has been in years — and the Val Verde Temporary Processing Facility, which was used to support local jails overwhelmed by the record number of arrests along the border, was closed,” Nolen said.

Texas DPS officers are making an average of nearly 100 arrests per week along the Texas-Mexico border, Nolen said. That is a small fraction of the number being detained under Operation Lone Star during the Biden administration, when local jails were overwhelmed until the state set up the booking facilities and began holding migrants at state prisons.

The massive state police agency has reallocated much of its resources to the interior of the state, where troopers are working on specific teams to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest thousands of undocumented immigrants. The state has labeled the mission “Operation Lone Star 2.0” to underscore its newfound focus on immigration operations hundreds of miles away from the border.

The Legislature earmarked $3.4 billion for border security for the current two-year state budget that runs through the fall of spending plan.

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune.