Juan Antonio Gomez Torres was earning barely $80 a week shaping mud into bricks in the dusty hills above San Felipe, Mexico. When his wife became pregnant with their fourth child, he decided to try his luck crossing into the United States to look for better-paying work.
Weeks later, Mr. Gomez called his cousin from a jail in Kinney County, Texas, desperate for money. After swimming across the Rio Grande, Mr. Gomez had been arrested by armed state police officers on a trespassing charge, with bail set at $1,000 — more than a quarter of his yearly income.
Mr. Gomez promised to repay his cousin after he appeared in court on the trespassing case, when under normal circumstances his bail money would be returned to him. But that never happened. No sooner had Mr. Gomez been released than Kinney County officials handed him directly over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities, who promptly deported him back to Mexico. Unable to show up in court, he was told his bail would be forfeited and the $1,000 deposited into Kinney County’s own accounts.
He was not the only one. Since Gov. Greg Abbott stepped up the state’s own immigration operations during a surge in unauthorized border crossings in 2021, Kinney County has forfeited bail from hundreds of migrants, many of whom, like Mr. Gomez, were trying to escape poverty in their home countries.
The arrests, which are continuing despite a significant reduction in border crossings, are part of a contentious and potentially lucrative new dynamic on the southern border as states like Texas attempt to take on a larger role in immigration enforcement, traditionally the purview of the federal government.
More than 39,000 migrants have been arrested in counties along the border on charges of trespassing on private land and other state violations, part of Governor Abbott’s multi-billion-dollar effort to step up policing on the border, known as Operation Lone Star.
Few counties have been as aggressive about enforcing trespassing laws as Kinney County, where ranchers complained that migrants were cutting holes in their fences and walking in groups outside their homes. The county has held some migrants in custody for as long as a year before trial.
Over the past four years, the county has refused to return $1.7 million in bail from migrant trespass cases, according to a Times analysis of county budget records obtained through a public records request. The forfeitures are the equivalent of what it would take to pay for the entire sheriff’s department for a year, or the county judge and county attorney’s office combined for over three years.
The border operations brought in additional state funding as well, and together with the bail forfeitures, provided a new source of revenue for the county.
Brand-new trucks appeared outside the sheriff’s department. The county judge and county attorney — the officials who handled the thousands of trespassing prosecutions — each got a substantial raise. Their offices hired new staff members.
County officials say their residents felt under siege and they had an obligation to act.
“The goal of Operation Lone Star — for me in my jurisdiction — is to create a deterrent in Kinney County,” the county attorney, Brent Smith, said in an interview. “So if someone wants to cross illegally and commit crimes, they pick a different county to do it in.”
Deportation Is Not an Excuse
When someone like Mr. Gomez pays bail to get out from behind bars, that money is not a fine or penalty. It is collateral — if defendants show up for all their court dates, they are supposed to get their money back.
Especially in the early days of Operation Lone Star, many migrants had no idea when they opted for bail that they would be deported before their court proceedings could be completed. As word of speedy deportations spread, many opted to pay bail nonetheless, deciding that deportation was better than spending months behind bars.
“I couldn’t leave my family suffering,” Mr. Gomez said of his urgent attempt to get quickly out of jail. He and other migrants assumed they would get their bail money back, especially since some migrants’ families had to sell their belongings and take out loans to pay the bail money.
Courts deal with a range of reasons defendants do not show up after posting bail. Judge Dennis Powell, a retired Texas district judge from Houston, said he had heard of defendants stuck in the hospital, or even in jail somewhere else.
Defendants are given a chance to explain themselves in a bail forfeiture hearing, during which a judge can decide whether the reason is acceptable.
While other counties in Texas often simply dismissed charges against migrants who had been deported, allowing their bail to be returned, Kinney County took a much harder line. In most cases, migrants either showed up in court or lost their bail. Not all of the migrants whose bail was forfeited had been deported; some did not show up in court for other reasons.
When Texas began prosecuting thousands of new trespassing cases under Operation Lone Star, it hired several judges to handle the ballooning workload. Many of these were retired jurists, like Judge Powell, who was hired in 2022 and began hearing cases in Kinney County.
Judge Powell said he was uncomfortable when prosecutors demanded that he order bail forfeited for dozens of cases he handled, although there is no provision in state law prohibiting it.
“It just didn’t seem fair,” Judge Powell said. “It’s like locking a guy to a tree and saying, ‘You got to show up for court’ — well, you know he can’t.”
Mr. Smith acknowledged that the county had taken a more aggressive role than most other Texas counties in forfeiting bail, but he argued that those who paid have accepted personal responsibility for returning to court.
“If your actions contribute to you not being able to be in court, that’s not an excuse,” said Mr. Smith, who is both the county’s chief legal counsel and also its prosecutor in criminal cases. “So if a person chooses to cross the border illegally, and they get deported and they’re in another country, then, legally, that’s not an excuse for not being in court.”
Mr. Smith said that the residents who elected him gave him a clear mandate to go after trespassers as aggressively as possible. The county, with a population of 3,130, lies on a remote bend of the Rio Grande and became a major crossing point during the coronavirus pandemic, when limits on asylum applicants at official ports of entry pushed thousands to attempt to smuggle themselves into the country instead. By 2021, Kinney was in the midst of a full-blown crisis.
Ranch owners reported new holes cut in their fences almost daily. On some ranches, entire portions of fence were knocked down so vehicles could move through. While the property damage was considerable, residents’ main complaint was a feeling of personal danger. A local ranch manager, Wayne King, said he had awakened to as many as 15 men moving past outside his door. “You don’t know who they are, or what they’re doing,” he said.
Mr. Smith and other county officials said migrants had broken into empty farmhouses and deer blinds, and sometimes taken food and water, as well as binoculars, knives and guns.
Mr. Smith said that penalizing migrants, including those who have been deported, can deter other crossers and get “some measure of justice” for landowners who have been harmed.
‘You Have to Get Me Out of Here’
The monthslong wait for trespassing trials, some migrants said, created pressure to eventually post bail. Juan Antonio Verastegui Aranda, a migrant from Mexico, said he had crossed the border in October 2021 and jumped into a grain car on a Union Pacific train headed north. When the train stopped at a switching yard in Kinney County, the local police arrested him on suspicion of trespassing. His bail was set at $3,500.
Mr. Verastegui decided he would rather wait out his incarceration than pay bail. Like Mr. Gomez, he had left his pregnant wife behind with the promise that he would send her money. He could not bring himself to ask for money from the woman he had vowed to take care of.
But four months in jail made Mr. Verastegui desperate. Eventually, he swallowed his shame and called his wife from jail. “You have to get me out of here,” he said.
His wife borrowed money from everyone she could ask. She sold their TV, microwave and refrigerator. She sold the screens on their windows. Even after she had raised the $3,500, she still had to pay a fee to a Texas courier to deliver the money.
Because the sheriff’s office only accepts bail in person, with cash or a cashier’s check — and because local bondsmen will not serve migrants — many migrants have been forced to make similar payments to a cottage industry of informal couriers. Unable to pay upfront, Mr. Verastegui’s wife took out a high-interest I.O.U. to pay the courier.
After getting his bail, Texas officials handed Mr. Verastegui over to ICE, and he was deported. This month, Mr. Verastegui was back in Mexico, still working to pay off his debt to the woman who ferried the cash.
In-Person Hearings Become Mandatory
Migrant defendants who had been deported from Kinney County have been allowed to appear for some of their arraignment hearings by video conferencing.
But many migrants have struggled to gain access to these hearings, even when a public defender is there to represent them. Some live in villages so remote that there is no internet.
In early 2023, Kinney County suddenly began scheduling dozens of final pretrial docket calls, for which in-person attendance was mandatory. Judges forfeited bail for those who did not show up.
“They’re basically just roll-call hearings: You show up and say, ‘Present,’ when your name is called,” said Kristin Etter, who led the lawyers representing Operation Lone Star defendants for Texas RioGrande Legal Aid until November 2023. “It’s just so they can say they failed to appear, and they can take their bail.”
Mr. Smith, the county attorney, said judges began requiring in-person, roll-call-style hearings to ensure that the court was not wasting time creating trial dockets for defendants who were not going to show up for trials that would in any case have to be held in person. “The judges implemented an in-person docket call, and what that does is say: ‘OK, who’s actually going to show up for trial? Before we call the jurors and take time out of their day,” he said.
Courts across the country have disagreed as to whether or not deportation is an acceptable reason to miss court. Mr. Smith cited a ruling from a Texas appeals court that ruled deportation did not qualify as an “uncontrollable circumstance.”
“It’s not my responsibility to make sure they’re here. It’s their responsibility,” he said.
But César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University who has studied such cases, said a Colorado appeals court evaluating a similar legal question found that a defendant’s bail should not have been forfeited when he could not appear for his trial after being deported.
Public defenders said they had pleaded with ICE to at least delay their clients’ deportations, but were told that such a request would have to come from prosecutors, not defense lawyers.
Judge Powell, the Houston judge hearing cases in Kinney County, said he was baffled as to why prosecutors would not attempt to work with ICE to get their defendants to trial.
“I asked them, ‘Look, why don’t you just ask ICE to keep them here?’ Why wouldn’t the prosecutors take all the steps they could to make sure the defendant was at trial?” he said.
In 2024, Judge Powell, along with at least three other judges who declined to forfeit bonds for deported defendants, was asked by state officials to step down from hearing Operation Lone Star cases. “They were happy to see me go, and I was happy to go,” he said.
The federal government’s policy appears to have only hardened since President Trump took office again.
“The Department of Homeland Security is not going to give criminal aliens a free pass to remain in the United States just because they are a defendant in a criminal proceeding,” the department said in a statement. “In every case, we will do what is in the interests of the American people.”
Many of the defendants deported before their trespassing cases were heard were confused about the legal process and never formally informed of their required court appearance, according to interviews with several migrants and their lawyers.
During Operation Lone Start’s often-chaotic first year, court documents show that Kinney County officials often failed to collect accurate contact information for defendants released on bail, in part because the defendants themselves were not sure where they would be. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that many residents from rural Mexico and Central America lacked specific addresses with street numbers.
Mr. Gomez, the brickmaker from San Felipe who had struggled to post his $1,000 bail, was one of the defendants who appear to have fallen through the cracks. On his bail certificate, which The Times reviewed, the “court date” portion of the document was left blank. That meant that on the day he was deported he had no way of knowing when, or how, he was expected in court.
He had assumed that the county would return his bail money to him once he had returned to Mexico.
For 10 months, Mr. Gomez said he heard nothing from Kinney County, until January 2023, when a letter appeared at the address in San Felipe he had given to his jailers. The letter announced that he had missed his arraignment in May 2022. It also noted that, as is Texas custom, a bailiff had walked out onto the steps of the courthouse and called his name loudly, three times. When he did not appear, the county had declared his bail forfeit, and it had opened an arrest warrant in his name.
However, the letter told Mr. Gomez that he would have the chance to appear at a bail forfeiture hearing, where he would be able to argue that he had good cause for not attending his arraignment.
There was only one problem: His bail forfeiture hearing was scheduled on Dec. 21, 2022. The letter — dated and stamped by Mexican postal services with its delivery day, Jan. 4, 2023 — did not arrive until after his hearing. Mr. Gomez said he still hoped to recoup his $1,000 bail. But, more than that, he said, he plans to work with a lawyer to clear the arrest warrant that was issued after he failed to appear.
It will be one less problem, he said, when he takes his next shot at crossing the border.
Steven Rich contributed reporting.
