In December 2016, Texas Department of Public Safety troopers arrested a woman on drunken driving charges in the picturesque Hill Country town of Brady. The arrest took place a few blocks from the Heart of Texas Country Music Museum and a few miles from the historical marker on the edge of town delineating the geographic center of Texas.

But the DPS classified this routine police work in the literal heart of Texas — about 200 miles from the Mexico border — as one of the nearly 40,000 border arrests it has made over the past two years, a statistic the department provides in online fact sheets and in testimony to lawmakers when touting its $350 million per year border security effort.

The Brady arrest is not an outlier in DPS statistics. According to an American-Statesman analysis of what the DPS considers border arrests, nearly 30 percent occurred more than 100 miles from the border — in Hill Country cities like Brady and Mason, as well as Panhandle towns like Seminole and Denver City. Included in the numbers are thousands of arrests in the West Texas cities of Odessa, Midland and San Angelo, nearly 200 miles from Mexico. Many of those far-flung arrests lack a nexus to cartel activity or smuggling offenses.

"I have concerns because the Legislature clearly defined the border in terms of border security, but DPS is using a broader geographic region," said state Rep. César Blanco, D-El Paso, who chairs the House Border Caucus. "Inevitably, and perhaps intentionally, that pads those border security statistics."

The questions over the DPS border arrests are just the latest to spring up around the department's border security metrics, an issue that continues to bedevil lawmakers as they prepare to consider another funding request for border policing.

For the legislative session that begins in January, the nonpartisan Sunset Advisory Commission, which periodically reviews state agencies for efficiency and effectiveness, has joined the fray, concluding that the DPS is not providing clear enough data for lawmakers to determine whether they are getting a good return on the multibillion-dollar investment they have made in recent years in the border security program.

Texas has undertaken periodic border security operations for the past two decades, but it stepped up the effort after the influx of large numbers of Central American families and unaccompanied children in the summer of 2014. The next year, the Legislature massively increased state funding for the effort, providing $800 million over two years, most of which went to the DPS. While state troopers cannot enforce federal immigration law, they have taken part in surveillance activities, increased highway patrols and criminal investigations fueled by an extensive border intelligence apparatus. According to the Sunset Advisory Commission, border security has gone from being a "component" of the DPS's larger responsibilities to its "own distinct mission."

Even as it cut spending in other areas, the Legislature matched that 2015 funding for border security in 2017, despite the belief among some that the election of Republican border hawk Donald Trump could allow the state to spend less of its own money on what is traditionally a federal responsibility. The DPS has requested roughly the same funding from the 2019 Legislature.

What makes up the border?

The definition of the Texas border area is hardly set in stone, and various government agencies, nonprofits and law enforcement entities have their own conceptions of what makes up the region. Few limit the zone to the 14 counties that actually sit along the Rio Grande. The Department of State Health Services counts 32 counties in its Office of Border Health. The state's Border Prosecution Unit, which funnels money to prosecutors building complex cartel- and smuggling-related cases, covers 49 counties. The U.S. Border Patrol has traditionally operated within (though not exclusively) an informal 100-mile zone where agents have greater powers to stop and search residents.

For the state's high-priced border security effort and the metrics lawmakers use to gauge its success, the Legislature has come up with its own definition: a strip of about 30 counties along or just beyond the border and the Texas coast. Yet when it comes to the DPS, lawmakers have agreed to let the agency use its own internal regions to compile border security statistics. "The Legislature has allowed DPS to report in a way that matches the agency's internal tracking," said R.J. DeSilva, spokesman for the Legislative Budget Board.

DPS Regions 3 and 4 cover the entire border region but also extend well into the interior. In all, more than 60 counties make up the department's border security zone.

"In my opinion, these stats don't paint an accurate portrayal of what's happening on the border and don't help us evaluate the performance of state border security operations," said Blanco, a former military intelligence analyst who has frequently sparred with the DPS over its border statistics. "I don't understand how you can justify certain arrests in Midland, Odessa or the Texas Hill Country as border security."

The DPS defended its use of its internal regions for record-keeping, noting that the Legislature has signed off on the practice. "We have continually reported statistical data from these regions to the Legislature, the LBB and the public," department spokesman Tom Vinger said in a statement.

"Arrests are only one category of data among a wide variety of border-related statistics that DPS reports to the public, the Legislature and State Leadership," Vinger added. "DPS Regions 3 and 4 also include many smuggling routes used by criminal elements to smuggle drugs and people from the border area to the interior of the state and the rest of the country."

Yet the arrests include thousands that are unrelated to smuggling. More than one-quarter of the DPS criminal border arrests are for DWI.

Questionable statistics



As they have dramatically increased their border security funding to the department since 2015, lawmakers have struggled to spell out metrics that would allow them to determine whether the expenditures are bearing fruit.

Defining success along the border is no straightforward task. The federal government has changed its definition of border security success half a dozen times since 2001. Texas officials have likewise presented sometimes opposing statistical metrics following border operations: In some cases, high numbers of drug seizures and arrests have been touted as success; in others, low numbers have been held up as evidence of deterrence.

The debate over border security metrics has also become a political issue, with mostly Democratic border-area lawmakers questioning DPS efforts that Republican lawmakers overwhelmingly support.

Yet the DPS's own handling of its numbers has invited scrutiny.

A week before submitting a performance report to the Legislature in 2015, when it first asked for a nearly $800 million infusion in border security funds, the department quietly changed the way it calculated the value of drug seizures, going to a retail price instead of the wholesale number it had been using. The simple change, first discovered by a Statesman investigation, inflated its drug seizure values to $1.8 billion, more than 10 times what it would have been under the previous method.

Later in the 2015 legislative session, the newspaper learned that the DPS had included seizures made by the U.S. Border Patrol in its numbers. In reality, DPS seizures accounted for less than 10 percent of the numbers presented to lawmakers.

And after an Associated Press review of border arrests in 2016, the DPS agreed to remove child support evaders from its list of "high threat" criminal arrests.

This year, the Sunset Advisory Commission has found that the department's publicly presented border security data, emphasizing the number of "boots on the ground" and various intelligence-related data, does "not provide sufficient information to policymakers or the public about the return on investment for border security funds." The commission called on the DPS to develop a system for collecting and maintaining "clean data" related to its border security mission.

"Just because obtaining data is difficult, or analysis of the data may be imperfect, are not sufficient causes to avoid the effort altogether," evaluators with the commission wrote. "Given its significant investment in border security, the Legislature deserves the best information possible on the return on that investment."

The Legislative Budget Board currently requires 80 performance metrics from state agencies involved in border security operations, ranging from the number of hours flown by surveillance aircraft to vehicle pursuits and arrest data.

Yet the Legislature, as some lawmakers acknowledge, has not been clear about spelling out its definition of success along the border.

"I'm confused as to what we've officially asked for and are not getting," Sunset Advisory Commission Vice Chair Chris Paddie, R-Marshall, told commission investigators during a May hearing. "If the Legislature wants additional reporting, it's on us to make that ask. ... We need to communicate better what we want more of, what we want done better."

Evaluators told lawmakers that the data they received from the DPS was in some cases riddled with errors or "not suited for data analysis" and represented only a "selective record of events and related measures."

The commission made a series of recommendations including consistently separating DPS results from those of other law enforcement agencies.

FBI crime statistics disputed



The Sunset Advisory Commission report also urged the DPS to provide FBI crime statistics on border communities so that the public and policy makers can gauge whether DPS efforts are improving public safety in the border region, suggesting a comparison of border crime rates over time and with other parts of the state. Such an effort would serve as a "partial proxy" for otherwise difficult-to-obtain measures of success, the report said.

For years, however, department leaders have played down the importance and reliability of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting statistics as an indicator of border-related crime since they don't include offenses like extortion and kidnapping. But the commission noted that the crime statistics include important indicators such as homicide, aggravated assault, drug distribution and other offenses "often perpetrated by transnational criminal organizations." Border-area lawmakers often cite low crime rates in the uniform crime reports to argue the area is less dangerous than interior Texas cities.

The DPS has focused its efforts on rolling out a more advanced FBI program, the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which includes more smuggling-related offenses, but the commission urged it not to wait.

Asked whether the department would begin incorporating border crime statistics as requested, Vinger replied: "We already are. DPS has been reporting statewide crime statistics since 1976 and data specific to the border security initiative since 2014. The department will continue tracking the public reporting of crime statistics."

But while the DPS serves as the statewide repository for Uniform Crime Reporting statistics and presents those numbers on its website, the statistics are not broken down for border cities and counties or included in the department's monthly online fact sheets about the border campaign.

For some lawmakers, the very idea of requiring performance indicators from the DPS is in bad taste.

"It's almost offensive to say, 'What are the results?'" Sunset Advisory Commission member Rep. Dan Flynn, R-Canton, a member of the House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety, said during the May hearing. Border communities "are only safe because we've had a strong border presence. I would give anything that we didn't have to spend the amount we have. I would hope we could evaluate the results being that we still have a pretty safe environment."

The DPS said it would continue to report metrics in whatever form the Legislature requests.

"We have an obligation to be entirely and brutally transparent on every dime we spend, whether it's LBB performance indicators, the oversight commission, whatever data it is you deem appropriate," DPS Director Steven McCraw told lawmakers. "Whatever it is, we will provide it to you."