El Paso County

El Paso County did not choose most of its surveillance. It applied for a border security grant, and the grant came with equipment.

Operation Stonegarden is a federal grant, run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and administered in Texas through the Office of the Governor, that reimburses local police for patrols coordinated with the United States Border Patrol. El Paso County is the applicant and the fiduciary. It has signed an award every year the period its meeting record covers, with no county money required in any of them. The awards whose stated period is twelve months run between $1,005,339 and $1,515,965; the earlier ones are larger totals spent over two or three years, and the largest, $2,652,089.86, covered September 2011 to August 2014. It shares the money with the police departments of El Paso, Anthony, Horizon City and Socorro, with a constable precinct and with the San Elizario Marshal’s Office. Most of it is overtime. Some of it is equipment, and the equipment is named in a spreadsheet attached to the grant item rather than in the item the Court votes on.

We read the county’s meeting record through the Commissioners Court’s own portal: every agenda and set of minutes it publishes from 21 October 2013 to 15 September 2026, of which 1,545 are this body’s own and readable. The minutes are good ones. Each carries every item in order with its full text, then the motion with its mover, its seconder and each member’s vote by name. Before October 2013 the county publishes nothing online.

The plate readers

Volunteers have mapped 271 license plate readers inside El Paso County, and 205 of those are tagged Flock Safety. The county’s own contracts account for none of them. The word Flock does not appear once in thirteen years of this Court’s published record. Volunteers have also mapped six Flock Safety gunshot detectors here. All of that belongs to the cities, and this pass did not read the cities’ records.

What the county bought is smaller and older. Three readers from 3M in July 2014 for $47,600, on a purchasing cooperative contract, as item N of the consent agenda. One reader with software for the Anthony Police Department and four in-car licenses for the Sheriff’s Office in the 2018 grant budget. Four more licenses in the 2020 budget. Two reader trailers, one bought with supplemental 2017 border money accepted in December 2019 and one from Vigilant Solutions in June 2021 for $56,060, with a hosting renewal at $49,995 in September 2024. Every one of them charged to a Stonegarden account.

The grant asked for something the county’s record does not contain. The Office of the Governor’s standard conditions, filed with the county’s own grant items, require any grantee spending plate reader money to have a written policy on use and retention, and to sign a user agreement putting the data into the Texas Department of Public Safety’s statewide plate reader database, where it is shared with every participating local, state and federal agency. No policy, no retention period, no user agreement and no search audit appears anywhere in the readable record. The plate readers border money bought has each purchase.

A town police department, working plate readers for the Border Patrol

The grant packets include an operations plan saying what each participating agency will do. The plan filed with the October 2019 item describes enhanced day and night patrols, surges to gather intelligence, and a Border Patrol Station Integrated Planning Team the local agencies sit on. Under the heading for the Anthony Police Department, a town of a few thousand people in the county’s north west corner, one line says the department will support Border Patrol with plate reader operations. Anthony has its own reader, bought with the same money. Operation Stonegarden has the budgets and the plan.

The county is inside a federal intelligence center

The Sheriff and the District Attorney are both constituent agencies of the Texas Anti-Gang Center of El Paso, which the county’s own paperwork records is the same place as the West Texas Anti-Gang Center. The other parties are the El Paso Police Department, the City of El Paso, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the FBI, the DEA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations and the ATF.

The Court joined in July 2016 and renewed in April 2019. Both times the item sat in the consent agenda, the batch a Commissioners Court approves in one motion. Both times it cost the county nothing. The only description of what is in the building is a phrase in the agenda item about providing a common physical environment equipped with the most advanced technology. There is no equipment list, no data retention period and no statement of who may run a query. The 2019 addendum did change one thing: admitting a new agency now takes a majority of the Executive Board rather than a unanimous vote. The West Texas Anti-Gang Center has the signature page.

Phone tools, paid for out of an intelligence grant

The West Texas High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area is administered inside the Sheriff’s Office, its director appears as the contact on county agenda items, and the Commissioners Court signs its grants, which include budget lines headed for an intelligence initiative. The Auditor’s payment registers the Court receives with every agenda show what those accounts paid for. Cellebrite, which the Court gave a sole source designation in February 2014 for a Universal Forensic Extraction Device already bought nine months earlier. And Pen-Link, paid twice at $4,485 in 2014. And CovertTrack Group, twice, charged to a state border crime account. The county’s record names the first of those three and what it is; for the other two it names only the company and the amount, and the descriptions of what Pen-Link and CovertTrack sell are each vendor’s own account of its products, not the county’s.

The biggest purchase is inside the jail

In September 2022 the Court spent $5,951,349.77 on the Downtown Detention Facility Surveillance Project, from Stanley Convergent Security Solutions, on a purchasing cooperative contract, paid for with county capital money and federal pandemic relief. That item was not on the consent agenda: it was item 16 on the regular agenda and it was voted on by itself, which makes it the exception in this record rather than the rule. The item names a project, a vendor and a price, and says nothing about how many cameras, what they can do, or how long a recording is kept. The jail camera project has what there is.

Two drones nobody bought

The county’s aviation insurance schedule lists the aircraft it insures: a 2016 DJI Matrice 100 and a 2021 DJI Phantom 4 Pro, each with 200 flight hours covered. Drone insurance has been renewed every year since 2019, charged first to the Road and Bridge operating account. No item in the readable record purchases either aircraft, and the insurance sits under Public Works rather than under the Sheriff. Separately, in late 2017 the county tried to become lead applicant for a Federal Aviation Administration drone integration pilot program with the University of Texas at El Paso; the item came back five times, a motion failed in December, and the Court recorded no action on three other dates.

What the record does not contain

Against 1,545 readable sets of Commissioners Court papers and 76 million characters, with search terms that do come back for the Court’s own name, the County Judge, the Sheriff, the consent agenda and Stonegarden, these words appear nowhere: facial recognition, Clearview, Flock, Fusus, ShotSpotter, gunshot detection, camera registry, cell site simulator, predictive policing, Verkada, Palantir. “Real time crime center” appears once, as a single line in a Motorola Solutions catalog of every product it sells, attached to a state contract item. Nothing was bought.

Those statements describe what the El Paso County Commissioners Court has published and nothing else. The Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney, the constables and the county’s city police departments all keep records this does not reach, and 17 sets of the Court’s minutes from 2025 and 2026 are published as scans our reader could not read. The largest gap is the City of El Paso, whose police department the EFF Atlas of Surveillance credits with plate readers since 2006, 23 mobile units, six reader equipped speed trailers, four drones and a voluntary private camera registry. None of that is county business and none of it was read here.

Where to take this

The Commissioners Court meets most Mondays at 9:30 in the morning at the courthouse downtown, with a special meeting on the third Thursday of each month, and public comment is open to anyone for five minutes on any subject, including subjects not on the agenda. How to show up in El Paso County has the room and the procedure. If you would rather reduce your own exposure first, the protect yourself guide is the place to start.