Texas’s anti-immigrant measures hint at extremes Trump second term may bring

Immigration policy in the United States may be on the verge of a seismic shift, as two new chapters begin: not only is Donald Trump about to start his second term as president but the Texas legislature is convening for a new session – and those events are likely to exert a strong influence on one other.

By 20 January, Republicans will hold the governmental trifecta in both the Texas and federal systems, in addition to majorities on their respective supreme courts. State and federal officials in both administrations have touted merciless immigration crackdowns.

And while Texas and the Biden government were at loggerheads over power and policy on the issue, Texas and Trump could now become eager partners.

What comes next could be a bruising mass deportation campaign that leaves US families broken and has huge consequences for the nation’s society, economy and international reputation.

Already, Texas has gotten a jump on the second Trump administration — and probably helped the former president return to the White House along the way.

Operation Lone Star, a signature initiative of the state’s hard-right governor, Greg Abbott, was started as a means of excoriating what Republicans called Joe Biden’s “crisis” at the US-Mexico border, almost as soon as he entered the White House. And quickly, Abbott escalated his rhetoric, calling the flow of migrants entering the US an “invasion” to justify his state power grab.

Throughout Biden’s term, Operation Lone Star’s masterminds continually found innovative strategies to amplify emotions around migration, in ways that were nearly always headline-grabbing. Case in point: Abbott’s bussing scheme, which started in April 2022 and had Texas officials coordinating unannounced migrant transports to Democratic-led cities across the nation.

Texas has dropped nearly 46,000 migrants in New York; more than 12,500 in Washington DC; almost 37,000 in Chicago; more than 19,200 in Denver; about 1,500 in Los Angeles; and more than 3,400 in Philadelphia. People have arrived without jackets or proper shoes in sub-zero temperatures, and buses have shown up late at night, early in the morning or on the weekend with little to no advance notice.

That was all part of the plan. Texas officials actively sabotaged information-sharing networks between border towns and destination cities in order to ensure the drop-offs were as chaotic as possible, while Abbott ignored pleas to at least pause transports during dangerous winter weather. Likewise, word on the street is that Operation Lone Star often offered free bus rides to migrants who couldn’t quickly qualify for work permits, guaranteeing that they would rely on government services and shelter longer.

And as calls from Democratic politicians in affected cities and states for more meaningful help from the federal government went largely unanswered, some leaders slowly began to turn on the migrants in their care. Perhaps most emblematic of this nimbyism: New York’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, infamously claiming that the increase in migrant arrivals would “destroy New York City”, comments that attracted their own outrage from progressives and immigration advocates.

Many everyday Americans agreed with his statement when polled, or at least felt ambivalent about the migrants and asylum seekers coming to their neighborhoods.

Seemingly overnight, an issue that many northern big city residents had been reading about from a distance had been – or could be – delivered to their own back yards.

New Yorkers balked at migrants being put up in hotels they couldn’t afford themselves, while local schoolteachers worried about overcrowding in their classrooms. People who had experienced homelessness in Denver couldn’t understand the outpouring of support for the newcomers when they and their friends had long gone through hell just to access basic needs. Black Chicagoans wondered why the city was so willing to invest millions of dollars for migrants, but not for their resident communities that require better infrastructure and support.

Amid so many festering tensions, local and state Democrats in jurisdictions that had once been bastions of pro-immigrant sentiment suddenly started casting asylum seekers as scapegoats and pointing fingers at the Biden administration.

“We want them to have a limit on who can come across the border. It is too open right now,” New York state’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, said in fall 2023.

Meanwhile, Biden’s team was dealing with their own obstructions and distractions from Texas. The state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, was cherrypicking courts to find judges sympathetic to his arguments, then filing lawsuits to block Biden’s immigration policies or keep the first Trump administration’s in force. The result was years of incongruent border and interior enforcement, as court orders prevented the administration from implementing anything resembling a coherent strategy well into Biden’s term.

At the same time, Texas went on the offensive and – as part of Operation Lone Star – started heavily policing its own border with Mexico. State troopers and Texas national guard members descended on small towns along the Rio Grande. The Texas legislature funded construction of a state border wall. Miles and miles of razor wire were unspooled to deter or trap migrants trying to cross into the US, and if that were not enough, Texas also installed floating buoys separated by saw blades in the international river, which was already treacherous.

In some cases, these extreme measures hindered the US border patrol’s ability to do its job, or threatened potential international incidents with Mexico. So the Biden administration sued. But each court appearance made the news, and when it did, the underlying message was that the federal government was trying to block border enforcement during a time of unprecedented migration to the US.

This is how Texas won the immigration narrative, turned many voters’ hearts and minds against immigrants as the topic was pushed rapidly up the political agenda, and ultimately helped re-elect Trump.

Now, the bussing program has diminished, given that too few migrants and asylum seekers are arriving since Biden clamped down on asylum rights. And, with Trump resuming office and calling up a team of anti-immigration lieutenants, Abbott has said that his state will redirect funding from the border to other priorities.

However, the Texas legislature already enacted sweeping laws in 2023 to bolster Operation Lone Star, including one that would create state criminal penalties for any non-citizen apprehended while making an unauthorized crossing of the Texas-Mexico border and implement a de facto state deportation system. The law was also a clear attempt to challenge the federal government’s authority over immigration.

That Texas law has spawned copycats among other Republican-controlled state legislatures, in places as far from the US-Mexico border as Iowa. But these attempts to further criminalize immigrant communities have all been blocked in court amid legal challenges from pro-immigrant organizations and the Department of Justice.

But under Trump, it’s difficult to imagine continued federal resistance to such laws.

Already, Trump’s incoming “border czar”, Tom Homan, has praised Texas’s immigration enforcement efforts as a “model we can take across the country”. Texas officials, in turn, are buying up land and offering it to the Trump administration as a staging ground for mass deportations.

And while Trump and Texas officials terrorize immigrant communities through enforcement on the ground, state lawmakers are devising new ways they could traumatize and ostracize them further – for example, through a bill that would require government employees to detain and fingerprint children they suspect to be undocumented, then store that information.

Another potential target for Texas legislators this year that could serve as a wider model: the legal precedent that ensures kids have a right to attend public school, no matter their immigration status.

Greg Abbott didn’t make it from Trump’s shortlist of running mates to the vice-presidency. But in the end the incoming president owes a debt to Operation Lone Star for rapidly reshaping views of immigrants and, while horrifying many, successfully desensitizing large sections of the US public to what’s to come.