League City seeks grant to send some officers to the border
By Sarah Grunau
The Galveston County Daily News
Aug 7, 2023
LEAGUE CITY -- League City council Tuesday will consider authorizing a grant application for about $2.5 million to send some police officers to the Texas-Mexico border.
At least 38 League City police officers have shown interest in heading to the border to fight what some have referred to as an immigration and drug-smuggling crisis, city officials said. At least 78 said they had no interest in going, officials said.
The police department is requesting the money to buy equipment such as night-vision devices, body armor and uniforms and to pay the salaries of two League City police officers to rotate to the Texas border each week.
Some city officials have argued League City has a direct stake in policing the border because it is a main avenue for the lethal synthetic opioid fentanyl to enter the Texas and the nation.
Galveston County in 2020 had the state’s second highest rate of overdose deaths, many attributed to opioids in general and fentanyl in particular.
Officers who don’t volunteer for the Operation Lone Star program won’t be obligated to participate and those who said they would like to participate are committing to the effort, Interim Police Chief Cliff Woitena said.
The city council will be tasked with drafting a border crisis disaster declaration in order to participate in the program, officials said.
Galveston County commissioners in 2021 approved a resolution saying Galveston County was “under imminent threat of disaster” because of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
County Judge Mark Henry at the time said the disaster was so bad he had given his permission for county law enforcement officers to travel more than 250 miles to the border. He had also committed $6 million in federal aid to the county on a plan to build a border wall.
The League City city council discussed the possibility of seeking a grant to participate in Operation Lone Star on Feb. 28, when officials from the police department held a workshop meeting to gather input from the city council on participating in the organization.
The council was presented with two options for participating in the program, one of which was fighting the border crisis within League City.
The first option would be difficult to justify because the city wasn’t seeing direct bad consequences, former Police Chief Gary Ratliff said during that workshop meeting.
The second option is sending officers to the border on a weekly rotation.
2 comments:
This is what Galveston County is all about. Galveston County has supplied Deputies for Operation Lone Star for a couple of years. Interim Chief Cliff Woitena was my partner when he was assigned to ACTF. Glad to see he is backing this project. The political climate changes when you cross Clear Creek into Galveston County. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of Evil is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke
Don't worry BGB, it's not your tax money. You live in a sanctuary county filled with bond reformed and released criminals.
I beg your pardon, it is my tax money. That grant, if issued, will come from the state so that the tax money will come from all Texans.
Even if my taxes did not pay for this proposal, it is still ridiculous. Sending a few cops - which could be better used to protect League City's citizens - down to the border won't make a dime's worth of difference in the illegal immigration problem.
And if Galveston County has sent deputies down to the border, I hope the Sheriff will not claim there is a shortage of deputies when budget time comes around.
Oh yes, when you cross Clear Creek into Galveston county things will be different. Galveston County is crazier than crazy Harris County.
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