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    • Texas is offering Trump a farm to help carry out his mass deportation plan
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    Texas is offering Trump a farm to help carry out his mass deportation plan

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    EL PASO, Texas – After years of Texas being the first stop for people crossing the border illegally, Lone Star State officials are volunteering to let President-elect Donald Trump use a state farm as the last place immigrants put foot on American soil first. being forcibly deported.Tuesday, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered Trump a 1,400 acre farm near the border in South Texas to host a mass deportation facility. Buckingham bought the farm earlier this year, she said, because the former owner refused to let Texas build a border wall over it.

    “I am committed to using all available means 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 the promise of launching the largest mass deportation in US history. In a statement, his transition office said the Trump-Vance administration remains committed to moving quickly.

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

    The largest previous mass deportation, in the 1950s, it removed more than 1 million people, mostly Mexicans but also American citizens, on a tour from California to Chicago. Some experts say the new deportation effort is likely to target not only violent criminals but also people who have lived in the U.S. for years but don’t have the proper documents.

    “State and local officials on the front lines of the Harris-Biden border invasion have been suffering for four years and are anxious for President Trump to return to the Oval Office,” said Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for the Trump-Vance transition. 1, President Trump will marshal every lever of power to secure the border, protect our communities, and launch the largest mass deportation of criminal illegal immigrants in history.”

    The Starr County farm is in the US Border Patrol’s Rio Grande District, which in 2022 and 2023 routinely recorded more than 40,000 migrants per month.

    Migrant encounters have declined over the past year in the Rio Grande sector, across Texas and along the US-Mexico border, after the Biden-Harris administration sharply restricted asylum access in June and Mexico stepped up its own enforcement efforts of the border. Texas officials are also taking credit for the decline, and last month the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande sector reported just over 5,000 crossing the border.

    Texas goes from border adversary to ally

    The farm land offer is the mark for a state that has repeatedly tried to push the federal government to action on the border, from clearing the way for Trump’s border wall to busing migrants to New York, Denver and Chicago .

    It also reflects a shift from Texas’ embattled relationship with the Biden-Harris administration, which American voters believe has failed to secure the border despite a sharp drop in illegal crossings over 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 steps up 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, spokesman for the Texas governor , Greg Abbott, for USA TODAY. last week.

    Other states have also responded. In the past three years, 21 Republican states have sent National Guardsmen and law enforcement to the Texas border, according to a tally provided by Abbott’s office. These include Trump’s pick for Secretary of Homeland Security, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noemwho was the first governor to send National Guard troops to the Mexican border.

    Democratic cities, states preparing for 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 worry that Trump’s promises of a military-backed effort will also hurt families and children, as well as those who have sought asylum.

    California Governor Gavin Newsom has called a special legislative session for December to secure resources to challenge Trump’s agenda in court. The Chicago Board of Education passed a resolution reaffirming its commitment to protecting immigrant students with different legal statuses, while New York’s commissioner of immigrant affairs promised the city would uphold its sanctuary laws protecting immigrants.

    Michael Kagan, who directs the University of Nevada-Las Vegas Immigration Clinic, said many immigrant rights groups are skeptical that Trump’s mass deportations will target only violent criminals. But to achieve the large number of deportations he has promised, he would likely need to target nonviolent immigrants, experts said.

    “He has a lot of supporters who are clamoring to see buses full of people picked up and deported, but he can’t actually fill those buses if he’s only looking at violent criminals,” Kagan said. Immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than US-born people, statistics show.

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

    More: Trump’s second presidency sparks fear of ‘scary’ time among immigrants

    Kagan said Texas’ farm offer is a stepping stone for a big change in how Americans view immigration and the border.

    “Under Biden, the focus has always been border-driven. By definition, people arriving at the border are foreigners. But Trump is changing that debate, and now the focus is shifting to immigrants who have lived in our communities for a long time,” Kagan said. “Some of the voters who supported Trump may not feel that way. they were waiting”.

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