Low bar for border busts to be labeled ‘high threat’

Arrest statistics include minor crimes, incidents far from the border.

Drivers i n Texas busted for drunken driving, not paying child support or low-level drug offffffffffffenses are among thousands of “highthreat” criminal arrests being counted as part of a nearly $1 billion mission to secure the border with Mexico, an Associated Press analysis has found.

Having once claimed that conventional crime statistics don’t fully capture the dangers to public safety and homeland security, the Texas Department of Public Safety classifified more than 1,800 offffffffffffenders arrested near the border by highway troopers in 2015 as “high-threat criminals.”

But not all live up to that menacing label or were anywhere close to the border — and they weren’t caught entering the country illegally, as Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is Texas’ chairman for GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, has suggested.

In response to the AP’s fifindings, the Department of Public Safety said it will recommend removing child support evaders from the list and signaled a willingness to stop classifying other arrests

as “high threat.” However, it defended the data overall, saying it isn’t intended to measure border security, even though the fifigures are included in briefifings to lawmakers.

“It’s deceptive to say the least,” Democratic state Rep. Terry Canales, from the border city of Edinburg, said of the data. “I would say it’s shocking that a person arrested with a small amount of cocaine in Odessa is used to show supposedly highthreat criminal arrests on

the Texas-Mexico border.” The AP used open records laws to obtain a list of 2015 Texas Highway Patrol arrests classifified as “high threat” in a broad 60-county area that the DPS has defifined as the border region, then reviewed

online court and jail records for cases in Hidalgo and El Paso counties, which had

the most such arrests. Among the “high threat” incidents was a trailer that unlatched from an RV and rolled into oncoming traffic, killing anot her driver in a town more than 150 miles from the border. Other crimes lumped in with suspected killers and human trafficker s were speeding teenagers and hit-and-runs that caused no serious injuries.

Republican leaders have used crime, smuggling and immigration data to justify an intensifified deployment of troopers, armored boats

and spy planes to the border since 2014. And Trump’s promises to wall offff the border with Mexico resonate with many in Texas, where Republican lawmakers tripled border security spending last year, and in 2017 will consider approving another $1 billion.

A threat overview published by DPS in 2013 defifined high-threat criminals as “individuals whose criminal activity poses a serious public safety or homeland security threat.” But about 40 “high threat” offenses can be overly broad. For instance, nearly half the 2015 arrests were for possession of a controlled substance, but DPS doesn’t distinguish between a gram of cocaine

and a drug smuggler’s 50 pounds of marijuana. And

failure to pay child support is included with sex crimes under offffffffffffenses against the family. High- threat arrests, which are tracked statewide, are among nearly three dozen “border security related” metrics coll ected by DPS, according to agency briefings given to lawmakers.

But DPS Director Steve McCraw told the AP that high-threat data isn’t used to assess border security but rather is included in briefifings for the sake of transparency. McCraw said the term “high threat” was never meant to suggest only the worst of the worst, but rather to distinguish more serious crimes.

“I don’t care, we can change the name,” McCraw said. “Just so long as, internally, we have a way of differentiating.”

Hi dalgo County, i n the Rio Grande Valley, is one of the busiest corridors for drug an d human trafficking in the U.S. and is where Texas deployed an inflflux of troopers, National Guard patrols and camera surveillance. While dozens of 161 high-threat arrests for drug possession were alleged pot smugglers, about 1 in 5 were charge d with having less than a gram or other lowlevel drug charges. Drunken drivers who didn’t pull over are also counted the same as flfleeing traffiffickers. Some lawmakers, including members of Texas’ House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety, said they didn’t pay attention to high-threat arrests and that the data isn’t included in high-level briefifings.

But foll ow ing a border visit in March, Patrick incor

rectly tweeted that DPS had arrested about 14,000 highthreat criminals in the previous year. Patrick adviser Sherry Sylvester said the lieutenant governor had be e n “u n i n t e n t i o n a l ly unclear,” but then herself falsely described the arrests as “criminal illegal aliens” who pose a “serious threat to public safety in Texas.”