An investigation into claims made by a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) employee has cleared DPS officers of any wrongdoing against illegal immigrants. The whistleblower accused DPS troopers of physically stopping illegal immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande River and not giving them water to drink.

The Houston Chronicle ran the story of a DPS trooper who leaked an email that he said instructed DPS officers on ways to stop those trying to cross the Rio Grande River from Mexico. Some suggestions included pushing small children and women with nursing babies back into the river. Officers were instructed not to give the illegal immigrants water to drink.

When the story broke, I said I was skeptical. It didn’t make sense. Texas DPS troopers work with Border Patrol agents along the southern border. There is no shortage of videos that show DPS and Border Patrol rescuing illegal immigrants and helping them get to the river’s bank.
This leaked memo encouraging alleged inhumane treatment just didn’t sound right. At the time I wrote that it was odd for a whistleblower to leak an internal email to a supervisor instead of taking it to a reporter. Wouldn’t the supervisor be the one issuing instructions to employees?

The Texas Office of the Inspector General began an investigation into the trooper’s claims about the DPS enforcement orders. Texas Democrats jumped on the bandwagon against DPS troopers working along the border. They asked the White House for DOJ to get involved and investigate. At the time, a migrant was alleged to get caught in the buoy border barrier’s razor wire. There isn’t razor wire on the buoys, though. The wire on the buoys doesn’t cut skin. The wild accusations made by Texas Democrats raised a red flag that they were using this whistleblower’s claim as a way to shut down Governor Abbott’s actions to secure the southern border.

DOJ announced it would sue Abbott over the buoy barrier system in the Rio Grande River. That legal battle continues to this day.

In August, Rep. Joaquin Castro (San Antonio) was one of the Democrats who met with Lt. Chris Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety and other officers at the border. They wanted to see the buoy barrier. At the time, Olivarez encouraged the lawmakers to wait for the investigation to be completed before jumping to conclusions. Nonetheless, Castro told Olivarez to “tell those guys if we find out that people were putting kids back in the water, we’re going to encourage the Department of Justice to charge them with murder. Or attempted murder.”

The investigation found no wrongdoing by DPS agency officials, though six troopers working for Abbott’s border security initiative, Operation Lone Star, made allegations of mistreatment of illegal immigrants last summer. The inspector general found that the incidents raised by the troopers did happen but they didn’t violate law or agency policy. There will not be any formal punishment.

The whistleblower, DPS medic, Nicholas Wingate, did not comment on the investigation’s findings on Thursday.

The inspector general found there was no “formal order” to deny migrants water under “any circumstance,” but rather not to give them water under “every circumstance” so that troopers were not encouraging migrants to cross the Rio Grande, according to the executive summary. It said migrants were given water in instances when it was needed.

The investigation also found that there was no directive to “push” migrants back into the Rio Grande, as Wingate alleged in his email, but rather troopers were told to “verbally instruct” migrants to go back to Mexico or a port of entry.

“The term push in this regard was never intended, nor was it widely interpreted to mean troopers should physically force migrants back toward the river,” the executive summary says.

The summary says there were instances where migrants were injured on the state’s razor wire, but investigators found no evidence that the wire “or any other devised deterrent” was placed “with the intent to harm migrants.”

The investigation took three months and 51 people were interviewed. There was a review of 108 gigabytes of body camera footage, emails, reports, messages, and other document.

Rep. Castro doesn’t believe the findings. Democrats were quick to blame law enforcement along the border.

“Individual DPS troopers risked their careers to blow the whistle about the abuses that are part of Operation Lone Star, and their accounts align with what asylum-seekers have also said,” Castro said in a statement. “We have to remember that senior leaders at the Texas DPS lied about Uvalde. Operation Lone Star is a political stunt, and DPS leaders have become little more than spokespeople for Governor Abbott. They’ve lost all credibility, and there is no reason to trust that they can honestly investigate themselves.”

Democrats don’t want the border secured. Remember Whipgate? That whole thing began when an adviser to Castro’s twin brother, Julian Castro, began a phony story of Border Patrol agents whipping illegal immigrants with the reins of their horses. The story went viral on social media, though it was a lie. The agents were suspended and their reputations were forever ruined. An investigation found the story to be false, yet the Border Patrol agents never received so much as an apology from DHS Secretary Mayorkas.

Let the Democrats keep trying to shut down Governor Abbott. The work of Operation Lone Star began in March 2021 when the Biden border crisis exploded. The initiative put in place by Governor Abbott continues until Biden does his job.