BORDER PROSECUTION UNIT

The Border Prosecution Unit, or “BPU” as it has come to be known, is a history-making initiative involving the Texas Department of Public Safety and each of the district attorneys in the border jurisdictions of Texas. Stretching from El Paso to Brownsville and covering forty-nine counties along and adjacent to the Rio Grande, the BPU encompasses a network of seventeen Texas district attorney offices, including the 79th Judicial District. In each of these offices, an assistant district attorney is assigned to handle a specialized caseload of border crime cases.

The genius of the BPU program is the close collaboration, communication and coordination it has promoted between state prosecutors and the Texas Department of Public Safety. BPU lawyers work with their DPS counterparts on a daily basis to identify and disrupt the criminal organizations operating in our border region. In addition to the assistant district attorneys working in each of the 17 jurisdictions, a regional attorney is assigned and housed in the DPS offices in each of the three BPU regions and additional prosecutors assigned to Texas Anti-Gang Units throughout the state.

Alfonzo A. Cuellar is the BPU attorney for the 79th Judicial District Attorney's Office, Ricardo Byington is the DPS embedded BPU attorney assigned to the 79th Judicial District as a regional resource, and Rand Booth is the Regional Counsel for Region 3 of the BPU. Carlos Omar Garcia is a BPU member and, during the 2015 BPU Annual Meeting, was re-elected to the BPU Executive Committee for a second two year term which expired at the end of 2017.