Texas Closed Del Rio Operation Lone Star Booking Facility Last Summer

Internal booking logs recorded no activity at the Val Verde Temporary Processing Facility after May 2025, yet state officials said nothing about the shutdown for months. The closure of the facility in Val Verde, home to Del Rio, had not been previously reported or acknowledged by state officials until Tuesday.

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. 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.

DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen confirmed the closure 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.

The facility sat adjacent to the Val Verde County Sheriff's Office in Del Rio, where it functioned as a dedicated booking hub for Operation Lone Star arrests in the region. 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."

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.

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. The Val Verde facility was one of two booking hubs the state stood up for the initiative; the other operated in Jim Hogg County. Abbott credited President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown with decreasing the number of border crossings and making the Jim Hogg facility's planned closure possible, saying, "Thanks to President Trump, illegal border crossings are at all-time record lows," and declaring there was "no longer a need for Texas to maintain the jail booking facility in Jim Hogg County."

The state's official framing, however, was complicated by the underlying data. Internal booking logs showed that the number of illegal border crossings had been decreasing for months before declining further under Trump's second administration, adding nuance to the claim that federal cooperation drove the closures.

Texas DPS officers are now making an average of nearly 100 arrests per week along the Texas-Mexico border, a small fraction of the number 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. DPS has since 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 undocumented immigrants — a mission the state has labeled "Operation Lone Star 2.0."

The Val Verde County facility's closure, confirmed only after questions from reporters prompted a DPS response, leaves open the question of how many people were processed there during its years of operation and what, if any, formal decommissioning process accompanied its shutdown.