Amid Trump immigration crackdown, Texas reins in border spending and shifts focus to deportations

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For four years, Texas’ Republican leaders argued President Joe Biden's immigration policies were so lax that they had no choice but to spend an unprecedented $11 billion in state money to secure the border.

Now with President Donald Trump in office, illegal border crossings have sunk to historic lows — and the state is continuing to spend another $3.4 billion on border security over the next two years, more than four times what lawmakers ever budgeted before the Biden-era buildup.

The way the money will be used reflects Texas’ changing strategy in reaction to Trump’s return to the White House, propelled by campaign promises to deliver mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.

Most of the $3.4 billion will go to the Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas Military Department, the agencies that have enforced the state’s four-year crackdown by surging police and National Guard troops to the border. Paired with newly approved legislation that will require local cooperation with federal immigration authorities, those agencies will be positioned to offer the Trump administration extra manpower for its immigration enforcement efforts across the state, including raids hundreds of miles from the border.

In their final state budget draft, lawmakers also slashed funding for Texas’ incomplete border wall, a further display of the state ceding border traffic control to the feds and focusing its own resources on interior enforcement.

Both DPS and the Guard have already emerged as force multipliers for the Trump administration’s enforcement apparatus. During Trump’s first weeks in office, Gov. Greg Abbott directed DPS to work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and signed an agreement with ICE to let the Guard make immigration arrests.

“Thanks to President Trump's bold leadership, the federal government is finally fulfilling its obligation to secure the southern border and deport criminal illegal immigrants. Because of these renewed federal assets in Texas, our state can now adjust aspects of state-funded border security efforts,” Abbott press secretary Andrew Mahaleris said in a statement. “Texas will continue to maintain a robust presence with our federal partners to arrest, jail, and deport illegal immigrants.”

Mahaleris added that specialized units within DPS and TMD will “carry on their missions both at the border and throughout Texas.”

Already, DPS has developed regional strike teams at the governor’s direction across the state to support federal authorities, including ICE, DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen previously told The Texas Tribune. As of early April, the agency had identified nearly 5,800 “criminal illegal immigrants with active warrants,” she said.

“DPS’ tactical strike teams are a part of the department’s continued focus on preventing, detecting and interdicting criminal activity — including the arrest of criminal illegal immigrants in Texas,” Nolen said, adding that the units — working with Trump’s newly formed Homeland Security Task Forces — were focused on arresting “people who have entered the United States illegally and then gone on to commit crimes in the state.”

The border was already quiet when Trump returned to office after Biden last summer widely restricted asylum. But it has grown even quieter.

In May, Border Patrol agents arrested 12,452 people for illegally crossing the southwest border, according to the most recent figures from the Department of Homeland Security. In comparison, agents arrested about 170,000 people the previous May.

In Texas, law enforcement officials along the border have booked 230 people this year into two jails set up for Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, according to intake statistics through early May. Abbott shuttered one of the facilities, in Jim Hogg County, earlier this year due to the downturn. The second site in Val Verde County last year averaged 276 monthly bookings.

“We started to see pretty quickly that the numbers were starting to go down, as far as crossings, so it made us reassess where the needs were,” said state Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican who serves as the upper chamber’s lead budget writer. “We still had the desire to secure the border, make sure things were going well. But we also had a lot more participation with our federal partners.”

That partnership has state officials hopeful that the state might get reimbursed for the $11 billion it already spent. About $2.3 billion went toward the state’s effort to build a border wall, which so far has amounted to a series of disjointed steel bollards mostly in rural areas along the 1,250 miles of border Texas shares with Mexico. The state struggled to make progress on the expensive infrastructure project due to landowner resistance.

A spending bill passed by the U.S. House in May allocated $12 billion to reimburse Texas and other states for border security spending. But the megabill still has to clear the U.S. Senate before getting to the president. The upper chamber’s draft proposes $13.5 billion in state reimbursements, according to a spokesperson for U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who has led the push for the money.

In the meantime, the $3.4 billion in Texas’ two-year state spending plan is important to keep paying for a variety of programs, lawmakers said.

While DPS and the Guard account for 88% of the funds, the remaining $400 million will go to a variety of agencies including the Department of State Health Services, which keeps ambulances on standby at some immigration facilities. Other recipients include the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, which has peace officers in the border area; the Department of Motor Vehicles, which awards grants to local police helping combat car and catalytic converter thefts; and Abbott’s office, which also awards grants to counties and funds anti-gang initiatives.

The state’s collaboration with the federal government to enforce immigration laws, which have long been considered the sole responsibility of the feds, has stoked concerns that the funding will be insufficient to cover new costs incurred by local governments.

Under a bill passed this session, sheriffs of most Texas counties will be required to enter agreements with ICE, like the one Abbott inked earlier this year for the Guard. Those agreements include authorizing sheriff’s deputies to serve federal immigration warrants in jails and question people about their immigration status while doing their daily policing in the field.

Critics of the bill are worried that it could lead to distrust of police in immigrant communities and racial profiling, a concern that led the federal government to stop use of one of the programs, until Trump restarted it.

That bill creates a grant program to help offset costs, but some are worried it won’t be enough.

“That’s why Operation Lone Star grants are so important to some of these smaller, rural counties,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity for the left-leaning nonprofit Every Texan. “The budget doesn’t really account for (that).”

Rep. Eddie Morales, a Democrat from Eagle Pass whose district runs parallel to the border for 11 counties, called the last-minute decrease in border security spending “a step in the right direction.” He said the state should be cautious about how it spends taxpayer dollars, but as a representative in the minority party he also has to count victories where he can.

He pointed to securing a $1 million reimbursement in the budget for Eagle Pass.

Last year the state took over Shelby Park there, against the city’s wishes, to stage National Guard troops and state police because it had been a main crossing point for asylum seekers. In doing so, the state forced the city to reorganize, at the 11th hour, a festival it planned to host for the solar eclipse at the municipal park along the Rio Grande riverbank. The last-minute revamping cost the city — which was in the path of totality — about $2 million in losses, Morales said.

“I have to weigh and balance the issue of border security and protecting Texans with the expenses, right?” Morales, a moderate who supported a previous border spending package, said in an interview. “There's 10 ways in the Legislature to skin a cat. This is what’s being proposed, you know that the Republican party has the votes, and so it’s a matter of trying to make sure that they heard our voices as well.”

Disclosure: Every Texan has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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