The Badge and the Bud

How Harlingen Became Ground Zero for Hemp Enforcement Gone Wrong

 

A documented pattern of false statements, misread science, and legal overreach targeting licensed retailers — and what it reveals about the fragility of the rule of law when officers mistake confidence for competence.

 

There is a particular species of institutional injustice that arrives not in the form of malice but of certainty — officers absolutely sure they are right, retailers too frightened to say they are wrong, and a legal framework rendered meaningless by the distance between what the statute actually says and what the badge-wearers believe it says. Harlingen, Texas, has now furnished the hemp industry with not one but two documented examples of this phenomenon, separated by nearly three years and united by a single, consistent thread: law enforcement acting on a theory of cannabis prohibition that Texas law simply does not support, using tactics more appropriate to a criminal syndicate investigation than to a visit with a licensed retailer.

These are not allegations. They are documented in court filings, sworn affidavits, contemporaneous legal correspondence, and the surveillance footage of at least one of the businesses visited. The story they tell is worth telling carefully, without theatrics, because the facts are damning enough on their own.

 

A Licensed Retailer, an Armed Raid, and a Lab Report Officers Didn’t Understand

The first incident involves Trevor Kacoglan, owner of Rio CBD, a retail hemp store operating lawfully in Harlingen under the framework Texas law established through HB 1325. In the summer of 2023, Harlingen Police Department officers executed a raid on Rio CBD and seized the store’s entire inventory — products that, by every applicable legal standard, were lawful for sale.

The legal architecture governing that determination is not ambiguous. Texas Agriculture Code Section 121.001 defines hemp as Cannabis sativa L. and its derivatives, with a delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol concentration of not more than 0.3 percent on a dry weight basis. Texas Health and Safety Code Section 481.002 expressly excludes hemp — so defined — from the definitions of both “controlled substance” and “marihuana.” The statute does not say “total THC.” It does not say “THC as a whole.” It says delta-9 THC, on a dry weight basis, at a threshold of 0.3 percent.

The certificates of analysis for the seized products confirmed compliance with precisely that standard. I reviewed the COAs and submitted a formal opinion letter to Rio CBD’s attorney, Gilberto Hinojosa, Esq., of Brownsville, in my capacity as Executive Director of the Texas Hemp Federation. My conclusion was unambiguous: the lab that tested “Sour Space Candy” — the product at issue — was a reputable, appropriately licensed facility. The tests ordered met industry standards. The results were genuine. And those results showed a delta-9 THC concentration of “less than quantifiable” — below the threshold at which the instrument could even register a quantity, let alone one approaching 0.3 percent.

As I wrote in that letter, “the sample it tested does not contain even the legally permissible amount of delta-9 THC, but it does contain quantities of other hemp-derived cannabinoids which are fully legal.”

The officers who raided Rio CBD, in other words, seized product that was not just arguably legal — it was emphatically, documentably, scientifically legal. The “total THC” figure that apparently triggered their concern referred to the aggregate of all hemp-derived cannabinoids listed on the certificate — CBD, CBG, CBN, and others — none of which are controlled substances, none of which bear on the delta-9 threshold that defines hemp under Texas law.

The officers’ interpretation was, charitably and accurately, “simply an error” — a confusion between the legal standard and a column of numbers on a lab report that the officers did not understand how to read.

The consequences were not trivial. Rio CBD’s entire inventory was seized. The owner faced criminal prosecution, including felony charges. Those felony charges were eventually dismissed. By March 2024, the surviving misdemeanor charges were themselves headed toward dismissal, with defense counsel confident and the legal rationale for prosecution visibly evaporating. The Texas Hemp Federation had stepped in to supply legal counsel through David Sergi & Associates, and the charges collapsed.

But the inventory was gone. The financial stability of the store’s owners was, as contemporaneous industry reporting noted, “at serious risk.” Business had been disrupted. The damage was real and largely irreversible, visited upon people who were following the law while the officers enforcing it were not.

 

Three Years Later, Same Theory, Different Store

One might reasonably expect that an episode in which felony charges against a licensed hemp retailer were dismissed — followed by misdemeanor charges trending toward the same fate — would prompt some institutional reflection within the Harlingen Police Department. The events of April 13, 2026 suggest otherwise.

On that date, officers from the Harlingen Police Department, accompanied by a representative of the Texas Comptroller’s Office, entered Highly Motivated, LLC — doing business as Highly Motivated Smoke Shop — a state-licensed hemp retailer holding both a Retail Hemp Registration and a Consumable Hemp Products license issued by the Texas Department of State Health Services. The officers announced they were there to “educate” the business about its products.

The education they delivered was, as documented in a formal demand letter from David K. Sergi & Associates, P.C. to Chief Alfredo Alvear dated April 14, 2026, a catalogue of statements that were false under Texas law.

The specific claims, captured on the store’s surveillance system with audio and video, included the following: officers stated they were “looking for THC as a whole” and did not “care about delta-9.” One officer declared explicitly that “there’s nothing on the statute for delta-9” and that “the law looks to less than .3 of THC content” — not delta-9. Officers stated that paperwork showing sub-0.3% delta-9 concentration was insufficient, because they were “testing for THC as a whole within that product.” They announced that the retailer was “in possession of a bunch of marijuana.” They stated that, now the owner had been “informed” these products were allegedly illegal, any future sale would establish criminal “intent” — that this visit had effectively stripped the owner of any lack-of-knowledge defense. And they stated they could have obtained a search warrant, entered the business, seized everything, and arrested whoever was present.

Every one of these legal propositions is wrong.

The claim that Texas law does not turn on delta-9 THC is refuted by the plain text of Agriculture Code Section 121.001, Health and Safety Code Section 481.002(5), and Health and Safety Code Section 443.001(1). The claim that officers could rely on a “total THC” or “THC as a whole” standard is flatly inconsistent with a Temporary Restraining Order entered just three days earlier — on April 10, 2026 — by Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of the 455th Judicial District Court of Travis County, in Texas Hemp Business Council et al. v. Texas Department of State Health Services et al., Cause No. D-1-GN-26-002511. In that order, the court found that regulatory rules requiring compliance with a “total delta-9 THC” or “acceptable hemp THC level” standard — rather than the 0.3% dry-weight delta-9 threshold enacted by the Legislature — likely exceeded statutory authority, and temporarily restrained the state from enforcing any such framework.

The officers were not merely misstating the law. They were asserting, under color of authority and with the implied threat of arrest and prosecution, a legal theory that a Travis County district judge had just found to be probably unlawful. Whatever one makes of that coincidence in timing, the legal effect was plain: law enforcement was threatening a licensed retailer with arrest on a standard that courts had already flagged as likely beyond the reach of the statutes.

The reference to a “Class A2 felony,” reportedly made during the encounter, merits its own notation: no such offense classification exists in the Texas Penal Code. Texas has Class A and Class B misdemeanors, and felonies classified as state jail, third degree, second degree, and first degree. There is no “Class A2.” Whether the error reflects improvisation, intimidation, or simple confusion about the law being enforced, it underscores the broader point with some precision: these were officers speaking with considerable conviction about legal matters they did not understand.

 

The Test That Can’t Do What Officers Said It Does

Both incidents share a second, compounding failure: the use of a presumptive colorimetric field test — the DetectaChem MobileDetect CBD/THC pouch — as though it constituted definitive proof of unlawful delta-9 THC concentration.

It does not, and the manufacturer says so explicitly, under oath.

In a sworn affidavit executed on November 25, 2024, DetectaChem CEO Mark Kisner stated that the MobileDetect CBD/THC pouch is a presumptive field test intended only to detect the presence of CBD or THC in order to provide guidance as to whether a sample warrants further laboratory testing. The test detects THC in delta-8, delta-9, delta-10, and any other THC isomer present in a sample. It does not differentiate between delta-9 and other isomers. Both false positives and false negatives are possible. “A laboratory test,” Kisner’s affidavit specifies, “should be used to confirm the THC level to determine if it is above the .3% concentration of Delta-9 THC.”

Officers at Highly Motivated represented, in substance, that the device would return a negative result for any product under 0.3% delta-9 and would not test positive unless that threshold was exceeded. That is not what the test does, and it is not what DetectaChem’s own CEO says under oath the test does. A screening tool designed to prompt further investigation was being deployed as investigation’s final word — and then used as the basis for threats of arrest, prosecution, and business closure.

This is not a minor procedural quibble. The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures requires probable cause to rest on reliable information. A presumptive field test that cannot distinguish lawful delta-8 from unlawful delta-9, that its manufacturer explicitly says should never substitute for laboratory confirmation, and that admits a known false-positive rate does not supply the legal predicate for arresting or seizing the inventory of a licensed retailer. Using it as though it did — and then misrepresenting its capabilities to the owner — is a meaningful constitutional departure, not an administrative oversight.

 

How to Manufacture a Criminal: The Intent Gambit

There is a specific tactic documented in the April 2026 incident that deserves its own careful attention, because it reveals a degree of sophistication about criminal law that makes the surrounding errors harder to attribute to ignorance alone.

Officers told the owners of Highly Motivated, in substance, that the visit itself — this ostensibly educational encounter — was transforming their legal situation. Having now been “informed” that their products were allegedly illegal, continued sales would supply the “intent” element necessary for criminal prosecution. The officers were, in effect, announcing that they had just stripped the owner of any good-faith defense by delivering a briefing built on a false legal premise.

This is a peculiar theory to deploy when the underlying premise is wrong. The logic requires several links to hold simultaneously: that the products are illegal (they are not, under the statutes as written); that an officer’s erroneous assertion of illegality constitutes legally cognizable “knowledge” (it does not, when the assertion itself is false); and that the retailer therefore proceeds at criminal peril if she continues operating. None of these links holds. A licensed retailer cannot be rendered criminally culpable by an officer’s misstatement of the law. Knowledge of an illegality that does not exist cannot supply a mens rea that the underlying conduct does not support.

What the tactic does reliably produce, however, is psychological pressure. A small business owner, hearing from uniformed officers in an official capacity that continued operation now exposes her to intentional criminal liability, has every incentive to close — regardless of what the law actually says. The Sergi demand letter identifies this dynamic with precision: “Law enforcement does not get to manufacture culpable mental states by visiting licensed businesses and falsely telling them that lawful products are illegal.”

 

Who Gave the Order? The DA’s Office and a Question Worth Asking

One detail in the Sergi letter to Chief Alvear is easy to pass over but should not be. Officers reportedly stated that the April 13 visit was undertaken at the instruction of the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office. If accurate, this shifts the character of the incident from a patrol-level enforcement misadventure into something considerably more deliberate — a coordinated effort between the police department and the county’s chief prosecuting authority, built on the same legally erroneous theory a Travis County court had just restrained.

The Sergi letter was accordingly copied to the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office — placing that office on formal legal notice of the factual and legal deficiencies in the theory being enforced in its name. The implications of a coordinated enforcement campaign premised on a framework that courts have already found likely ultra vires are not trivial. They are the kind of implications that, in a well-ordered legal system, should prompt a frank internal conversation before the next “educational visit” is dispatched.

 

A Pattern, Not a Pair of Incidents

Considered together, the Rio CBD seizure of 2023 and the Highly Motivated encounter of 2026 describe something beyond two unconnected mistakes by officers who happened to misread a certificate of analysis. They describe a jurisdiction with a persistent institutional posture toward hemp retailers — one that substitutes officers’ intuitions about what the law should say for what the law actually says, and that is prepared to deploy the coercive apparatus of state power to enforce those intuitions against licensed business owners who have done nothing wrong.

The Rio CBD felony charges were dropped. The misdemeanors were headed toward dismissal. The same theory — “total THC,” not delta-9 — reappeared three years later, now accompanied by a Comptroller’s representative, explicit threats of arrest, a nonexistent felony classification, and a field test being wielded in a manner its manufacturer has disavowed under oath. The legal landscape, far from growing more hospitable to this theory over time, has moved sharply against it: the Travis County TRO is the most recent judicial assessment of the “total THC” framework, and it found that framework to be probably unlawful.

None of that appears to have given Harlingen pause.

 

What the Constitution Requires

It is worth pausing to state plainly what the governing framework actually demands, because the contrast with the documented conduct is clarifying.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, applicable to state and local law enforcement through the Fourteenth Amendment, requires that searches and seizures be supported by probable cause — a genuine, objectively reasonable basis for believing that evidence of a crime will be found. A colorimetric field test that cannot distinguish lawful delta-8 from unlawful delta-9, and that its own manufacturer says must not be used as the basis for arrest or seizure, is not probable cause. A COA showing sub-0.3% delta-9 THC, combined with an officer’s legally incorrect insistence that delta-9 is not the relevant standard, is not probable cause. It is the inversion of probable cause.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of substantive due process protects citizens’ liberty to engage in lawful commercial activity free from arbitrary government interference. The Texas Constitution, in Article I, similarly provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The licenses these retailers held — Retail Hemp Registrations and Consumable Hemp Products licenses issued by DSHS — represent constitutionally protected property interests. Entering a business and threatening the destruction of those interests on legally erroneous grounds is not a neutral educational visit. It is state action of the kind that requires genuine legal justification.

The rule of law is, among other things, a promise: that the text of the statute means what it says, that citizens who comply with that text will be protected rather than prosecuted, and that those who exercise state power will be constrained by the same legal framework they are charged with enforcing. When an officer announces that “there’s nothing on the statute for delta-9” in a state whose hemp law is built entirely on delta-9, that promise is broken — not by the retailer, but by the officer.

 

What It Would Actually Take to Fix This

The Sergi demand letter to Chief Alvear offers a professional courtesy alongside its demands for retraction and evidence preservation: Sergi & Associates has, in the past, conducted educational meetings with law enforcement agencies on precisely these issues and would be willing to do so again. That offer reflects a realistic understanding of how these problems develop. Texas hemp law involves genuine technical complexity — the interplay between agricultural definitions, laboratory methodology, food-safety regulations, and criminal statutes is not intuitive, and officers trained on older marijuana-enforcement frameworks can reasonably be expected to struggle with the distinctions.

But training is a remedy only if the institution is willing to accept that it has something to learn. A department that dispatches officers to deliver the same legally erroneous theory across multiple enforcement actions spanning three years — accompanied by explicit threats of arrest, a misrepresented field test, and at least one invented felony classification — has not demonstrated that receptivity. The educational sessions on offer are valuable; the willingness to receive them is what remains to be shown.

More structurally: clear written policy guidance from police leadership, specifying that officers must rely on the delta-9 standard as enacted and that COAs showing sub-0.3% delta-9 results are presumptively exculpatory absent confirmatory laboratory testing, would constrain individual officer discretion in precisely the areas where that discretion has been most harmfully exercised. Mandatory pre-enforcement legal review before any visit to a licensed hemp retailer would add a layer of scrutiny these field encounters have clearly lacked. And whether the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office will revisit its guidance to HPD in light of the Travis County TRO is an open question — one worth pressing in the open.

 

A Note on the Broader Moment

These events are unfolding against a backdrop that gives them additional weight. The Texas Legislature has been embroiled in the hemp debate building since SB 3 passed the House. Polling by Fabrizio, Lee & Associates, conducted May 28-29, 2025, found that 70 percent of Texas voters — including 59 percent of Republicans — want hemp-derived THC to remain legal with strict regulation rather than be banned outright. Opposition to Governor Abbott signing a hemp ban runs roughly three-to-one statewide, with Republicans opposing by double digits. The political winds are not blowing toward prohibition; they are blowing toward the orderly, regulated market that Texas hemp law was designed to create.

In that context, a pattern of enforcement actions in Harlingen premised on a legal theory that courts are increasingly rejecting represents not just a local law enforcement problem but a statewide one. Every unlawful seizure, every threat of arrest, every “educational visit” built on a misreading of the delta-9 standard erodes the institutional credibility of the regulatory framework that legitimate retailers, responsible distributors, and law-abiding consumers depend upon. It drives business underground, or out of state, or out of existence — outcomes that serve neither public safety nor the rule of law.

The retailers in Harlingen who have been targeted — and the attorneys and advocates who have defended them — have done precisely what the legal system asks of citizens who believe they are being wronged: they have documented the conduct, preserved the evidence, engaged legal counsel, and sought redress through the institutions the Constitution created for that purpose. Whether those institutions respond in kind is the test that remains to be passed.

 

Jay Maguore is Political Editor of the Texas Hemp Reporter and Blazed News and Executive Director of the Texas Hemp Federation. I have been involved in the hemp industry’s legal defense work since the original Sky Marketing Corp. v. Hellerstedt litigation and serve as investigator and public affairs consultant for the Industry .