Paramilitary policing has been a fact of life in South Texas for more than 200 years, a centuries-long occupation stretching back at least to Steven F. Austin’s call-to-arms for a force of men—what would become the Texas Rangers—to clear the land of its indigenous residents on behalf of the newly arrived settlers (and their slaves) from the American South to what was then Mexican territory. The social order that would take shape over the following decades, organized through technologies of race and property and enforced with violence, is reproduced today through an assemblage of police agencies for which policing migration and policing local communities are merely two facets of the same project. This integrated approach is a central feature of Operation Lone Star, the latest in a series of border security operations launched by the Texas state government since 2006 that have funneled thousands of additional police officers and billions of dollars’ worth of security infrastructure and equipment into communities like this one.

Pictured here are a Webb County Sheriff’s Office vehicle and a SkyWatch mobile surveillance platform deployed outside of United Step Academy, a public high school with a student population that is more than 99 percent Hispanic/Latino (source). SkyWatch platforms have been used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, by the U.S. Border Patrol, and by local police agencies across the country. This model was made by ICx Technologies, which has since been absorbed by Teledyne FLIR. In long-term use cases such as this, the platform will not contain a live operator; instead, surveillance footage can be transmitted to a control room or stored on hard drives that are periodically harvested.