Hidalgo County

Volunteers have mapped 296 devices in Hidalgo County, 265 of them license plate readers, and Flock Safety is the manufacturer recorded on 231. The Commissioners Court’s own record shows the county buying plate readers since 2017 on a standing sole source declaration, running mobile surveillance towers since 2012, co-running an intelligence center with a city police department and the state police since 2016, and accepting a donated iris recognition system in 2017. In July 2026 it approved more than half a million dollars of drones for the Sheriff’s Office in a single meeting.

We read 1,285 Commissioners Court agendas and sets of minutes, from January 2012 to September 2026, published on the county’s own agenda portal. Every one was readable. A Hidalgo County minutes page prints each item in full and records the motion, the seconder and the vote, so what follows is what the Court decided. The contracts behind those decisions are separate documents and we have not read them.

Plate readers

The county’s plate readers arrived as a standing permission and then a series of purchases under it. In March 2017 the Court found that competition was precluded for SkyCop surveillance units and granted a sole source declaration that would stay in effect until revoked. Its own later items call those units “sky cop license plate reader towers”. Ten more readers followed in June 2019 on a state contract for $137,050.68, seven more from Motorola in March 2020 for $137,026.00, Vigilant Solutions plate reader software in 2019 for $45,288.00, and Flock Safety readers, cameras and a license in November 2024 for $261,450.00.

None of it went through a bid notice describing the equipment in public. A sole source declaration, two state contracts and a purchasing cooperative are four ways to buy without one.

The only plate reader policies in the county’s record belong to two Constables, who adopted them in 2022 because their federal grant required it. No county-wide policy appears anywhere. License plate readers has the details, along with the 2025 agreements to put readers in state and county road right of way.

An intelligence center nobody described

Since October 2016 the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office has co-run the Texas Transnational Intelligence Center with the McAllen Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety. The Commissioners Court approved the founding memorandum of understanding and has approved an interlocal contract for the center’s continued operation four times since, most recently in August 2025. Each vote was unanimous.

In ten years, no item the Court has approved for the center says what it does, what data it holds, what it can query, how many people work in it, or what Hidalgo County pays toward it. The only supplier ever named is Forensic Logic, LLC, whose subscription agreement reached the Court in 2019 as a second amendment, with no price and no first amendment anywhere in the record. The Texas Transnational Intelligence Center has the details.

Towers, county and federal

Hidalgo County has owned SkyWatch mobile surveillance towers since 2012, on a sole source declaration that transferred to FLIR Detection in 2015 when FLIR bought the original manufacturer, and that runs for as long as the county owns the towers. It bought more by sealed bid in 2019 and has kept them under a service contract since 2021.

In July 2018 it granted something different. In the consent block of a special meeting, among 61 items approved in one motion, the Court consented to U.S. Customs and Border Protection installing camera towers at Anzalduas Park, a county park on the river. The item is two lines. It names no number of towers, no equipment, no area and no end date. Surveillance towers has both.

Drones

The county started a drone program in August 2016 by granting a sole source and buying a turnkey package for $109,304.00, and it approved a written Unmanned Aerial System policy seven months later, before most of the aircraft existed. The policy’s text is not in the Court’s record. Nine drones followed in 2021, a BRINC tactical bundle in 2024, and in July 2026 the Court approved $270,000.00 of Department of Justice funds and a $264,650.35 purchase of ANAFI drone equipment in the same meeting. Drones has the details.

A biometric system accepted as a gift

In December 2017 the Court accepted the donation of a complete I.R.I.S. biometric system from BI2 Technologies, through the Southwestern Border Sheriff’s Coalition, with license fees, maintenance and support beginning in the fourth year. Nothing in the Court’s record from 2018 to 2026 mentions it again: no payment, no renewal, no cancellation. The donated iris recognition system has the details.

Where the money comes from

Hidalgo County is the recipient and administrator of Operation Stonegarden for a group of agencies that includes the Sheriff’s Office, all four Constable precincts and fourteen city police departments. Its FY2016 operations order, published as an attachment to a 2018 agenda, records a $3,500,000.00 award of which $918,316.18 was equipment, and lists six SkyCop surveillance systems going to four different agencies: two to the Sheriff’s Office at $117,500.00 each, one to Edinburg police, one to Hidalgo police and two to Pharr police. The Court has accepted a Stonegarden award every year we read, rising from $1,601,250.00 for FY2019 to $2,033,055.00 for FY2023.

Federal border money is how much of this equipment reaches the Rio Grande Valley, and the Commissioners Court’s vote to accept it is the only public moment in that chain. It is also the moment at which a resident can speak.

What we did not find

Across all 1,285 documents, with searches proven to work on terms we knew were present, the county’s record contains no facial recognition, no Clearview, no Fusus, no real time crime center, no ShotSpotter or gunshot detection, no Palantir, no cell site simulator and no camera registry.

That is a statement about the Commissioners Court’s agendas and minutes, not about Hidalgo County. Twenty city police departments sit inside this county, the Sheriff buys below the Court’s threshold without a vote, and the state and federal programs operating on this border do not appear in a county record at all.