The letter to President-elect Trump two weeks after his election victory 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, Stateline reports. The vast Texas acreage at the edge of the Rio Grande promises to become a centerpiece of the get-tough immigration policies Trump plans to unfurl under "border czar” Tom Homan. Republican governors 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.” 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 (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 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, 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 cleared the way for construction of a 1.5-mile border wall that was blocked by the previous landowner, Buckingham said. “We acquired that ranch kind of right at the beginning of early voting,” she said. “And then when Trump won, we figured they just may need some help with all the violent criminals for their processing, to get them off our soil.” Next came her letters to Trump and Homan offering federal access to the land “to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”
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