Texas is gearing up in a big way for Trump’s mass deportation campaign
While Donald Trump’s opponents denounce the president-elect’s planned “mass deportations” and border crackdown, this state’s Republican leaders are vying to make Texas the launching pad.
Gov. Greg Abbott and other top officials have spent the past four years positioning themselves as the Biden administration’s greatest antagonists — and heirs to the border enforcement campaign begun by the last Trump administration. Despite having no constitutional authority on immigration enforcement, they have used tools of the state to dramatically escalate anti-immigrant policy and legislation locally while steering a similar narrative nationally.
Among their moves: pumping $11 billion into Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border enforcement, busing migrants to distant states and targeting organizations that advocate for them. All marked a clear departure from the “compassionate conservatism” of a Texas GOP that once granted in-state tuition to undocumented students and resettled thousands of refugees.
And Trump’s imminent return to the White House gives the state powerful leverage.
“The leadership of Texas is trying to create a model for the federal government that is exceptionally tough and exceptionally cruel to immigrants,” said Daniel Hatoum, senior supervising attorney for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “Texas is more than willing to let the Trump administration co-opt its institutions for immigration enforcement.”
That was the core of Abbott’s message during a joint appearance Tuesday with Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, an event held at a state military base on the border in Eagle Pass. The small city about 145 miles southwest of San Antonio became the front line last year in the governor’s battle with the federal government over the “invasion,” as he called it, by record numbers of migrants.
“There is a change afoot as we speak right now,” the governor told scores of Texas National Guard troops and law enforcement assembled for a Thanksgiving meal. State officials are already conferring with Trump’s transition deputies about border security, he noted — on “actions, planning, preparation, schematics.” [Continue reading…]