EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) — The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office (EPCSO) will begin increasing patrols across the County on Wednesday, Nov. 26, ahead of Thanksgiving festivities. The operations will run through Sunday of next week. 

“For Thanksgiving weekend, as always, we have families coming into town. Everybody’s out there, celebrating, but we want to remind the community, please be responsible. We have an operation going on next week. We’ll have increased patrols in the streets,” El Paso County Sheriff Oscar Ugarte said.

Ugarte said Thanksgiving festivities usually commence Wednesday night, which has been infamously coined as “Blackout Wednesday” by younger people, one of the days of the year with the highest binge drinking rates. 

Uguarte said EPCSO will also be placing an emphasis on patrolling the dunes of Red Sands on the Friday after Thanksgiving, where he said El Pasoans gather in large crowds for what is commonly referred to as the “Turkey Trail Run.” 

“Every major holiday, here in El Paso, our community tends to go to Red Sands and have fun. So there’s a large concentration of people in the Red Sands areas. Unfortunately, they mix 4-by-4 vehicles with alcohol. When we have that mixed mixture, then there tends to be more accidents. There’s ATVs traveling in all directions. When there’s a dune, you do not know what’s on the other side of the dune, whether it is pedestrians or if there’s another ATV. So we remind the community, please be extra cautious,” Ugarte said.

Ugarte said his office will have deputies patrolling in four-wheel-drive trucks and ATVs from Friday morning, the day after Thanksgiving, through early Saturday morning. 

Earlier this year, during the 4th of July weekend, the Sheriff’s Office carried out a similar operation but at a much larger scale, at Red Sands and throughout the County, to crack down on drunk driving. 


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“The operations were successful. We had no major accidents, no shootings, no injuries. And we plan to do a similar operation for this Thanksgiving weekend,” Ugarte said. 

During that operation, EPCSO deployed over 100 Sheriff deputies to patrol in and around the Red Sands. 

Ugarte said his office conducted over 384 traffic stops and 53 arrests that weekend. He said 29 of those arrests were related to DWI crimes.

“You will see extra Sheriff’s Office deputies patrolling our community, and it’s not to take people to jail. That’s not the focus. The focus is we want community members to make it back home safely, enjoy the holiday weekend, but be responsible,” Ugarte said.