Minor trespassing case gives border action first court win
BRACKETTVILLE — After spending eight months in a Texas prison, Lester Hidalgo Aguilar walked into a small-town community center near the United States-mexico border this week and waited for his trial to begin.
Sitting in a vast, warehouse-like chamber, he listened for hours as a team of attorneys winnowed down a jury pool of about 75 local residents to six. After a lunch break, Aguilar, the jury and a swarm of county employees and attorneys from across the state moved into the local courthouse to hold trial.
The court proceeding was a big event in this 1,600-person town in Kinney County, a rural border region about 100 miles west of San Antonio. With the popular local restaurant closed, a gas station clerk had to step behind the counter of the Subway during the courthouse lunch rush to help an overwhelmed employee whose co-workers were part of the jury pool.
Aguilar was the first migrant to stand trial in Gov. Greg Abbott’s “catch-andjail” initiative under Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar border security crackdown launched last March in response to a sharp rise in illegal immigration.
In an attempt to deter border crossings, state police have arrested more than 3,000 men in Kinney County on trespassing charges since July. The county accounts for the vast majority of Operation Lone Star’s trespassing arrests, with migrants typically picked up on its many hunting ranches or at a remote railyard.
A large swath of local residents was called in to find six jurors. Three prosecutors sat on the bench at trial, and a fourth often stood up from the first row of public seating to whisper into their ears. And the case was heard by the
area’s felony-level judge, not the Kinney County judge, who typically handles misdemeanor cases.
Aguilar was arrested in September about 15 miles from the Texas-mexico border. U.S. Border Patrol agents spotted him and more than a dozen other men walking in the remote ranch land and called in the Texas Department of Public Safety to arrest the men under their new trespassing enforcement orders, according to the arrest report.
“I don’t think I ever have been as impassioned about trying a case in a long time,” Tony Hackebeil, a San Antonio attorney who led the prosecution for Kinney County, told jurors about the low-level charge Monday.
“Send that message,” he added. “Send the message to not just your community that you agree this should not be allowed to happen. But send a message as loud as you can to all of those people who are continually doing this.”
Aguilar’s court-appointed defense attorney, Bryan Owens, pressed the jury to remember the migrant’s case was not about immigration laws or border enforcement.
“A guilty verdict is not going to deter even one person from trying to cross the border,” the attorney said.
This case was only about Aguilar trespassing, he argued, and the state couldn’t prove Aguilar had breached a fence to enter private property. Owen also pointed out that the woman pressing charges was not the landowner, but the landowner’s sister.
Still, six jurors found Aguilar guilty of trespassing on fenced ranch land Monday evening after deliberating for less than 20 minutes.
State District Judge Roland Andrade gave Aguilar the maximum punishment for trespassing: a year in jail. But, against the wishes of the three prosecutors on the bench, Andrade declined to issue an accompanying fine.