Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner selected by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be his “border czar,” squeezed into a helicopter last week, as Gov. Greg Abbott gave an aerial tour of all that Texas had done to stop people from crossing illegally from Mexico.
There is a newly built camp for the Texas National Guard, whose border mission has looked a lot like a military deployment. Nearby, a line of buoy barriers in the Rio Grande puts migrants at risk of drowning. The river’s edge bristles with concertina wire that has often left bordercrossers with cuts and gashes. State police officers regularly patrol the brush, arresting migrants in an unusual extension of state authority into immigration matters.
“This is a model we can take across the country,” Mr. Homan said, addressing a group of National Guard members and Texas state troopers involved in border enforcement in the border city of Eagle Pass. “I am impressed by what I’ve seen today.”
Complaining that the Biden administration has failed to secure the border, Texas has spent billions of dollars over the past three years to prevent unauthorized border crossings on its own, often clashing with the federal government while pushing the legal limits of state power.
Now those fights are all but over, and the state is poised to take what could be a central role in what the incoming Trump administration has promised will be a swift crackdown on the border and the largest deportation program in memory.
Other Republican-led states have expressed support for the effort. In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox has promised to work with the incoming administration to “identify, incarcerate and deport” migrants who have committed crimes. Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma has said he would seek to deport unauthorized migrants currently in state prisons.
But Texas — as the only Republican-led state on the Mexican border — stands out.
In recent weeks, Texas officials have started new border programs, have prepared for an end to some legal fights with the federal government and have offered to help the Trump administration get its deportation program off the ground.
The state’s land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, has already offered 1,400 acres of state land on the border in South Texas for possible development of a large-scale federal deportation center. She disclosed this week that additional sites have been identified around El Paso.
“Whatever the federal government needs. I have hundreds of thousands of acres on the river,” Ms. Buckingham, a Republican, said in an interview. “If the Trump administration said, ‘Hey, we need to do something on a property that you have near Austin or near Dallas or near Houston,’ we’d be happy to oblige them.”
Mr. Abbott has said that he spoke to Mr. Trump about the border after the election, and that Texas was taking steps to prepare — “actions, planning, preparation, schematics” — for the deportation program.
Mr. Abbott’s office declined to provide specifics, and Mr. Trump has not outlined his plans, though he has said that he intends to declare a national emergency on immigration and that the United States military would be involved.
In a joint interview with Mr. Homan on Fox News, Governor Abbott said that he supported using the U.S. military for the deportation program, pointing to the Texas National Guard’s role in the state’s border security program known as Operation Lone Star.
“In Texas, we showed the way that the police force could work collaboratively with the military force, where the police are doing the policing, the military are doing things like building border barriers that deny entry,” Mr. Abbott said.
“Look, me and Governor Abbott, we’re already working together,” Mr. Homan added. “We’re already making plans. We’re not waiting for Jan. 20,” he said, referring to Inauguration Day. “The planning starts now. Jan. 20: Game on.”
But Mr. Abbott has also suggested that the state’s role will grow smaller as the Trump administration takes over, describing the state’s current border enforcement efforts as a “stopgap.”
Governor Abbott and other Republican officials, like Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, have said that the state would soon be able to redirect its spending on the border to other priorities. The state already has spent more than $10 billion on border efforts over the past three years.
“We’re going to be able to take a lot of that money now and put it back to our taxpayers for roads, for water, for education, for health care,” Mr. Patrick said in an interview on WFAA in Dallas after the election.
Democrats suggested that the governor should seek reimbursement from the incoming Trump administration for the money Texas has already spent. “I say the time is now,” said Representative Trey Martinez Fischer of San Antonio, the chair of the Democratic caucus in the Texas House.
Since President Biden took office, Governor Abbott has been pushing the boundaries of what a state can do to enforce immigration laws, an area reserved by the Constitution in most cases to the federal government.
State police began arresting migrants on state charges of trespassing on private land in 2021, housing thousands of them in state jails, often for months, pending trial. Most of the migrants opted to plead guilty in order to get out; many were ultimately deported by the federal government.
That process could now inform the federal government’s approach, said Kristin Etter, directory of policy and legal services at the Texas Immigration Law Council, a nonprofit immigrant rights group.
“Everything that they’ve done under Operation Lone Star is just a prototype for how to round up immigrants, put them in harsh conditions, pretend that you’re going to provide some level of due process and then coerce people to accept a deportation,” she said.
Earlier this year Texas attempted to provide even greater power to local police by making any unauthorized border crossing from Mexico to Texas a state crime, not just trespassing on private land. The law, known as Senate Bill 4, also created a process for state police to order migrants to return to Mexico. The state law was quickly challenged by the Biden administration and civil rights groups before it could go into effect and is currently on hold amid a federal court fight.
Even if the Trump administration were to drop the challenge, the legal case against S.B. 4 is likely to continue, since private groups have also joined the suit. “The law is patently unconstitutional and goes against a century of precedent,” said Adriana Piñon, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, which is helping lead the case.
Elsewhere, Texas has appeared increasingly confident that its legal situation on the border is about to improve. Since the election, Gov. Abbott has extended a buoy barrier erected by the state in the Rio Grande at Eagle Pass, in a move that appears to anticipate that the federal government would drop its legal challenge.
The state was doing even more until the number of migrants trying to cross the border dropped sharply from record levels last year. Texas’ migrant busing program — which brought around 120,000 migrants to Democrat-led cities like Denver, New York and Chicago — has been largely halted because there have not been enough migrants to fill them.
But immigrant advocates said the busing network could potentially be revived for a new purpose: to help deport migrants from inland cities.
“They could just turn those buses around and bus immigrants from blue cities back to Texas,” Ms. Etter of the Texas Immigration Law Council, said of Texas officials. “They already have all the infrastructure.”
Since the election, the state has announced new enforcement efforts of its own, such as the inaugural mounted unit for state police to begin patrolling portions of the border on horseback.
At the same time, some local law enforcement officials along the border said that they had not heard much in the way of preparations on the ground for any new border enforcement efforts.
“Nothing, so far as I know,” said Sheriff Tom Schmerber of Maverick County, which includes the city of Eagle Pass and was a frequent crossing point for unauthorized migrants during much of the Biden administration.
Sheriff Schmerber, a recently re-elected Democrat, said that he would work with the Trump administration on deportations, but that such an effort would require significant federal spending.
“I don’t have the place in the county jail, and I don’t have enough deputies to work immigration,” he said. “We don’t have the resources for that. Not that I don’t want to help.”
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