Trump wants to deport millions. Texas could help him.

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For more than a year, newly elected President Donald Trump has promised a sweeping crackdown on immigration, including ending Birthright, reviving border policies from his first term and deporting millions of people through raids and detention camps.

Perhaps no state is better positioned to help him than Texas. And no state will feel the impact of such initiatives more than Texas.

About 11% of immigrants in the United States, 5 million, live in Texas. The state is home to an estimated 1.6 million undocumented people – the second largest in the country, after California. It is also led by Republican elected officials who are politically in line with Trump.

When Trump left office in 2021, Gov Greg Abbott has deployed assets to the state’s 1,200-mile border with Mexico through a border security mission, Operation Lone StarThat has cost $11 billion in state money so far. It includes deploying thousands of Department of Public Safety troops and Texas National Guard troops to patrol the border. He started building one state-funded border wall after Biden ended Trump’s wall project. He sent busloads of newly arrived migrants from border towns to northern cities led by Democrats.

Those Texas state police and troopers could help Trump fulfill his big campaign promise of launching mass deportations, immigration lawyers say.

“We are in uncharted territory,” said Cesar Espinosa, its executive director FIEL, an organization which provides educational, social and legal services to immigrant families in the Houston area – home to approximately half a million people living in the country illegally.

FIEL — a Spanish acronym for Familias Inmigrantes y Estudiantes en la Lucha, which translates to Immigrant Families and Students in Struggle — tells their clients to prepare for “anything that can happen,” Espinosa said.

“We tell people this is like having a plan for a fire: you don’t know if a fire is going to happen, you can’t predict when a fire will happen, but you have a plan on how to get out,” said Espinosa

During his campaign, Trump has called for a variety of measures that would significantly change immigration. asylum and the lives of immigrants.

He said he will try to end automatic citizenship for children of immigrants in the country. He is introduced he would revoke legal status protections the Biden administration has given to people from specific countries, such as Haiti and Venezuela. He said he would reimplement policies from his first term, such as the one that banned people from Muslim-majority countries and required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for the duration of their asylum case.

But no proposal has received as much attention – or support from its fans – as it has Trump’s pitch to deport as much as 20 million people he says they have no papers. It is unclear how many undocumented people there are in the country.

The last time the US government undertook such a massive effort was in the 1950s Eisenhower administrationwhose plan to link federal authorities to local police Trump has cited as a model for his ambitions.

“If there are law enforcement and policymakers at the state level who support these initiatives, we could see an immigration enforcement authority that is much larger than just Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

Texas, which has voluntarily deployed police and military to immigration enforcement, is complying better than any state. While the Biden administration sought to check Texas’ authority — esp sue to stop A new law which would allow state police to arrest suspected undocumented persons for illegally entering the country – Trump has indicated he is eager to work with the state.

“When I’m president, I’ll send them reinforcements, instead of trying to send Texas a restraining order.” Trump told this to a crowd in Las Vegas in January. “Rather than fighting border states, I will use all the resources and powers of the United States President to defend the United States of America from this terrible invasion that is currently taking place.”

Immigration lawyers say that if Trump follows through on his deportation promises, he could also rely on existing law enforcement agreements between federal and local authorities while at the same time expanding the use of “expedited removal,” an expedited removal process that doesn’t require anyone to leave. before an immigration court.

Moreover, he inherits a ramp-up of the country’s deportation system that took place in the final year of the Biden administration, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

From May 2023 through March 2024 alone, the Biden administration processed more migrants through expedited removal, 316,000, than in any previous full budget year, according to a article that Bush-Joseph co-authored. The administration is on track to deport more people than the Trump administration did in its first four years.

“My assessment – ​​I think it’s a rational assessment – ​​is that there will be a lot of collaboration and synthesis between the state of Texas and the federal government,” said Joshua Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in the United States. Austin. “I don’t think Texas is going to say, ‘Okay, we’re done. I’m going to complete Operation Lone Star.’

Abbott’s office did not respond to an interview request. He has previously said the state will continue its border measures until there is a president in the White House to enforce immigration law. He has also said the state will not stop its efforts until it has control of the border.

“The people responsible for illegally moving people across the border are the drug cartels. The drug cartels have not stopped their activities, they have not disappeared.” Abbott said in Eagle Pass in May. “We cannot compromise on border security.”

On Wednesday, Abbott told reporters that Trump will need time to strengthen federal immigration enforcement and implement his border reforms, with Texas serving as a “stopgap.” He added that Texas “will have the opportunity to consider” repurposing Operation Lone Star money once Trump’s policies are in place.

Trump’s promised policies have the potential to upend the lives of millions of people in the state — as well as some major industries that rely on immigrant and migrant labor.

Immigrants represent roughly 18% of Texas’ population, but account for 40% of all construction workers and a significant portion of workers in the oil and gas and mining industries. research articles published in September by the American Immigration Council, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for immigrants.

“The impact this could have on Texas could be enormous,” said Espinosa of FIEL in Houston. “This could devastate a lot of industries here in Texas.”

Disclosure: The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization 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.