Texas offers Trump ranch to help carry out mass deportation plan

EL PASO, Texas – After years of Texas being the first stop for people crossing the border illegally, officials in the Lone Star State are volunteering to allow President-elect Donald Trump to use a cattle ranch State as the last place immigrants set foot on American soil before being forced. evicted.On Tuesday, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered Trump a 1,400-acre ranch near the border in South Texas to accommodate a mass eviction facility. Buckingham bought the ranch earlier this year, she said, because the previous owner refused to let Texas build a border wall across it.

“I am committed to using every means available to achieve full operational security of our border,” Buckingham wrote to Trump, saying the land was available to process, detain and deport “violent criminals.”

Trump campaigned on a promise that he would launch the largest mass deportation in U.S. history. In a statement, his transition office said the Trump-Vance administration remains committed to acting quickly.

Although Trump has repeatedly said he plans to target violent criminals, he has also said deportations could target as many as 20 million people, far more than the number of people with criminal records.

Largest previous mass deportation, in the 1950s, more than a million people were deported, mostly Mexicans but also U.S. citizens, in a roundup from California to Chicago. Some experts say it’s likely that the new deportation measures will target not only violent criminals, but also people who have lived in the United States for years but lack the required documents.

“Local and state officials on the front lines of the Harris-Biden border invasion have been suffering for four years and can’t wait for President Trump to return to the Oval Office,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump- Vance. On January 1, President Trump will mobilize every lever of power to secure the border, protect their communities, and launch the largest mass deportation of illegal immigrant criminals in history. »

The Starr County ranch is in the U.S. Border Patrol’s Rio Grande sector, which in 2022 and 2023 has regularly received more than 40,000 migrants per month.

Migrant encounters have plummeted over the past year in the Rio Grande sector, throughout Texas and along the U.S.-Mexico border, after the Biden-Harris administration sharply restricted access to asylum in June and that Mexico has stepped up its own border control efforts. Texas officials also take credit for the decline, and last month the Rio Grande Sector Border Patrol reported just over 5,000 people crossing the border.

Texas goes from border adversary to ally

The supply of ranch land comes as a state that has repeatedly tried to push the federal government into action at the border, from opening Trump’s border wall to busing migrants to New York, Denver and Chicago.

It also reflects a shift from the adversarial relationship Texas had with the outgoing Biden-Harris administration, which a majority of American voters say failed to secure the border despite a sharp decline in illegal border crossings. during the past year.

Texas has spent more than $11 billion of taxpayer money since 2021 on its own border security effort, known as Operation Lone Star.

“Until the federal government acts and does its job to secure the border, Texas will continue to use every tool and strategy to respond to the border crisis and protect Texans,” said Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesman for the Texas Governor Greg Abbott to USA TODAY. last week.

Other states also responded. Over the past three years, 21 Republican states have sent their National Guards and law enforcement to the Texas border, according to a tally provided by Abbott’s office. Among them is Trump’s pick for Homeland Security secretary, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, who was the first governor to send National Guard troops to the Mexican border.

Democratic cities and states prepare for the immigration battle

At the same time, Democratic-led cities and states across the country are working to strengthen protections for immigrant communities ahead of Trump’s inauguration. Many Democrats agree that migrants who have committed violent crimes should be deported, but fear that Trump’s promises of a military-assisted effort will also sweep away families and children, as well as those who have requested asylum.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom called a special legislative session in December to secure the resources needed to challenge Trump’s agenda in court. The Chicago Board of Education passed a resolution reaffirming its commitment to protecting immigrant students of varying legal statuses, while New York City’s immigration commissioner pledged that the city would uphold its safe-haven laws protecting immigrants.

Michael Kagan, who directs the immigration clinic at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said many immigrant rights groups are skeptical that Trump’s mass deportations will target only violent criminals. But achieving the high number of deportations he has promised would likely require targeting nonviolent immigrants, experts say.

“He has many supporters who are loudly demanding that busloads of people be taken away and deported, but he can’t actually fill those buses if he only cares about violent offenders,” Kagan said. Immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than people born in the United States, statistics show.

“When (Trump) talks about mass deportations, if he’s motivated by numbers, he’s going to have to deport undocumented immigrants living in American communities, your neighbors… regular people who just don’t have papers ” he said. “And I have to say, I don’t think even some Trump voters want that to happen.”

Kagan said Texas’ offer of the ranch represents a building block toward a sea change in how Americans view immigration and the border.

“Under Biden, the focus has always been on the border. By definition, people arriving at the border are aliens. But Trump is changing that debate and now the focus is shifting to immigrants who live in our communities for a long time,” Kagan said. “Some of the voters who supported Trump might not feel like that’s what they expected.”