IMMIGRATION“Anything we can do to help”: This Texas County Is Poised to Play a Key Role in Deportations
As Trump moves closer to reclaiming residency at the White House on Jan. 20, the vast Texas acreage at the edge of the Rio Grande promises to become a centerpiece of the get-tough immigration policies he plans to unfurl under recently named “border czar” Tom Homan. Impoverished Starr County might be the site of a new federal deportation center.
The letter to President-elect Donald Trump, sent to his Mar-a-Lago Club estate in Florida just two weeks after his resounding victory in the Nov. 5 election, came straight to the point.
“Subject: Texas offering 1,400 acres of land adjacent to the Texas-Mexico Border for construction of deportation facilities,” read the opening line of Texas Land Commissioner Dr. Dawn Buckingham’s eye-grabbing missive to the incoming president.
As Trump moves closer to reclaiming residency at the White House on Jan. 20, the vast Texas acreage at the edge of the Rio Grande promises to become a centerpiece of the get-tough immigration policies he plans to unfurl under recently named “border czar” Tom Homan.
Republican governors from across the country have expressed their eagerness to help Trump’s deportation efforts. In a joint statement issued last month by the Republican Governors Association, 26 of the 27 members (all except Vermont Gov. Phil Scott) declared that they “stand ready to utilize every tool at our disposal — whether through state law enforcement or the National Guard — to support President Trump in this vital mission.”
But Texas, the only Republican-controlled state on the U.S.-Mexico border, is poised to play a particularly vital role. In the past several years, the state has dispatched thousands of Texas National Guard troops to the border; enacted a law (which is on hold pending legal challenges) authorizing police officers to engage in immigration enforcement; and set up a string of floating buoys to block migrants from crossing the Rio Grande.
The Biden administration has fought those efforts in court, but the incoming Trump administration is expected to stand down.
Now it appears likely that a well-secured federal deportation center will be taking root in impoverished Starr County, on a huge patch of level farmland that now yields onions, grain sorghum, corn and soybeans.
Buckingham, a physician and former state senator whose agency oversees 13 million acres of state land, said she learned of the availability of the border tract from another state agency. She approached the owner and secured the land for $3.82 million at the height of the election season. The purchase also cleared the way for construction of a 1.5-mile border wall that was blocked by the previous landowner, Buckingham said.