Over the past four years, Texas has made itself an opponent of the White House on immigration issues.
Under Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, the state has expanded its law enforcement powers at the U.S.-Mexico border, added miles of razor wire barriers to discourage border crossings and bused more than 100,000 migrants to sanctuary cities in Democratic states, all in defiance of the administration’s Biden.
But as President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House next month and touts a plan to carry out the largest deportation of immigrants in American history, Texas is preparing to take on a new role in Washington: ally .
The state has already offered a 1,402-acre ranch on the Rio Grande as a potential site for detention facilities, and is willing to share its playbook for implementing immigration policy changes, such as the executive order requiring hospitals to inquire about the condition of a patient. immigration status and a measure that would allow police officers to arrest migrants and give state judges the power to order deportations.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham announced an initiative last week to identify land within the 13 million acres owned by the agency that the Trump administration could use for deportation operations, including the recently acquired ranch along the Rio Grande.
“We are actively looking at the properties we have in the state and seeing if it works for the Trump administration,” Buckingham told NBC News. “We have identified several properties in the El Paso area that we believe would be a good fit as well,” as well as in some urban areas.
Buckingham also said Texas would try to help guide the new administration’s policies on border security.
“We’ve come up with a lot of ingenious ways to scrutinize these criminals, and we’re happy to help anyone looking for advice or policies that seem helpful,” she said.
Incoming ‘border czar’ and former acting ICE director Tom Homan visits Camp Eagle in Texas on November 26.
The Trump administration is listening.
“You can’t have strong national security if you don’t have border security,” Tom Homan, Trump’s former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and new “border czar,” said at an event with Abbott last week. “There is unprecedented success in Texas. This is the model we can follow across the country.”
Abbott said at the same event that his state was going to “do more and faster than anything that has ever been done to primarily regain control of our border, restore order in our communities and also deport criminals in the United States of America who have crossed the border.”
Texas’s emergence as a prominent ally of the new Trump administration follows years of challenging and undermining President Joe Biden’s efforts on immigration.
“Texas is a natural leader because of everything they have accomplished over the last four years, with little public or political pushback,” said Andrea Flores, immigration policy adviser to the Biden and Obama administrations, and currently vice president of immigration policy and campaigns at FWD. us, a social welfare organization.
One of the most visible forms of opposition was the transport of more than 100,000 migrants from the border to sanctuary cities like New York, Chicago and Denver – a move that overwhelmed these Democratic communities, strained their resources and led to growing anti-immigrant sentiment around the border. the country that seeped into the presidential campaign.
The strategy led to “a governor deliberately sowing chaos against other states, without anyone intervening to stop it,” said Flores, who criticized the lack of federal intervention. “The crisis in the cities overshadowed the border crisis and led to a huge backlash.”
Other efforts in Texas under Biden could serve as a model for what will happen under Trump, some experts said.
“To the extent that there is coordination, or even cooperation, between the federal government and a state like Texas, the sky may be the limit,” said Rick Su, a law professor at the University of North Carolina. “This may be the missing piece in what I think, at least for the Trump administration, of what they plan to do.”
In 2021, Abbott declared a disaster at the border, opening the door to launch his Operation Lone Star to pay for the bus trips and provide $11 billion to send thousands of members of the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety to the southern border. creating new barriers, including 100 miles of barbed wire and buoys in the Rio Grande.
Earlier this year, Abbott signed an executive order requiring hospitals to ask about a patient’s immigration status and track the costs of treating undocumented immigrants.
“We have spent four years advancing an agenda and it is very likely that several states will do the same under the Trump administration,” Flores said. “Texas has given us a taste of what is to come.”
The state also passed a law challenging federal immigration authorities that “may be one of the most unprecedented modern laws related to immigration,” Su said. The bill, known as SB 4, would give police officers the ability to arrest migrants and impose criminal penalties. It would also give state judges the authority to order the deportation of people to Mexico. Implementation of the measure has been suspended while it is challenged in court.
But legal experts, including Su, are watching to see whether Trump’s Justice Department backs down from this and other legal challenges to Texas immigration policies undertaken by the Biden administration.
“In some ways this is just the beginning,” Su said.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
