Anything we can do to help’: This Texas county is poised to play a key role in deportations

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas — The letter to President-elect Donald Trump, sent to his Mar-a-Lago Club estate in Florida just two weeks after his resounding victory in the Nov. 5 election, 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 to the incoming president.

As Trump moves closer to reclaiming residency at the White House on Jan. 20, the vast Texas acreage at the edge of the Rio Grande promises to become a centerpiece of the get-tough immigration policies he plans to unfurl under recently named “border czar” Tom Homan.

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Republican governors from across the country 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.”

But 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 (which is 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 incoming 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, said she 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 also 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 told Stateline. “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.”

Buckingham has named the effort after Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl who was found dead in a Houston creek in June. Two Venezuelan migrants who were in the country illegally have been charged in Nungaray’s sexual assault and murder.

The ACLU of Texas has slammed the planned deportation center.

“Our state and country already waste billions on failed and inhumane border policies,” ACLU of Texas staff attorney Savannah Kumar said in a statement. “Now, Texas officials are offering to turn our culturally rich borderlands into sites for the mass caging of our community members.”

In Rio Grande City, City Manager Gilberto Millan Jr. said many of the roughly 15,000 residents are still learning about the planned deportation center. But at least some believe it will deliver an economic boost to Starr County, where nearly 29% of the people live in poverty, compared with 11% nationally.

In November, Starr County supported Trump over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by 55.6% to 40.2%, the first time since 1892 the county has voted Republican in a presidential election.

“I know that if they build that facility, that’ll bring a lot of jobs to the community,” Millan said. Even before the announced deportation center, Starr County was seeing an uptick in construction, retail and restaurants, he said.

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Although the potential deportation site is outside the city limits, it sits just a few miles from downtown Rio Grande City on FM 1430, a farm-to-market state road. Starr County residents now in their 60s and 70s recall how they used to pick fruits and vegetables on the irrigated land, working with their parents as youngsters.

“I worked that field since I was 8 or 9 years old,” said Eloy Garza, 75, a Starr County commissioner who left his post last month after being defeated in a Democratic primary in March.

Garza, whose county office was located just across from the property, also shared the view that the deportation center could be a job magnet.

“I’m for it — 100 percent,” he said. “I don’t know who wouldn’t like it.”

Bernardo Garcia, an 89-year-old retired criminal investigator, has watched the border wall rising in the distance from the modest frame house he shares with his 87-year-old wife on FM 1430. Although they haven’t been touched by crime, he believes the wall would be a “good thing” by serving as a barricade against those who “might be inclined to do some criminal acts.”

Despite the one-time surge of attention when Buckingham held a November news conference at the site to kick off border wall construction, at least some residents seemed largely oblivious to the project last month as construction crews worked at a distance from the highway to build the wall.

Meanwhile, immigration advocates contend that pouring resources into deportation efforts will consume dollars that could be better spent on needed infrastructure and social programs.

“This is very, very harmful,” said Joaquin Garcia, director of community organizing for La Union del Pueblo Entero, or LUPE, which serves immigrants in three Rio Grande Valley counties, including Starr. Garcia said the money should be spent on roads and housing, rather than “militarization” of the border.

“The last thing that Starr County needs is a detention center,” he said. “That is not something people want.”

A mass deportation effort targeting the estimated 11 million to 13 million immigrants who are in the country illegally would cost at least $315 billion, according to a study released in October by the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit research and advocacy group that favors immigration.

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Proposals from what the council describes as “leading immigration hawks,” including Homan, range from a one-time mass roundup of all immigrants now in the country illegally to a starting “baseline” of 1 million deportations a year, the study said. Modern-day deportations have never exceeded more than a half-million immigrants per year, said the study, and many of those were people trying to enter the United States, not those settled here.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement already operates at least 20 detention centers in Texas, and Buckingham says she is standing by to provide still more resources from her immense reservoir of state-owned land, including a potential site in the El Paso region. Some Texas sheriffs, she said, also may have an interest in acquiring state property in urban centers to “decongest a lot of the local jails” being strained by immigrant detentions, including alleged lawbreakers.

“Everything we’re doing is just to try and get those violent criminals off our soil,” she told Stateline. “We have actually hundreds of thousands of acres on or adjacent to the border. So we’re just going to continue to be here and be a good partner, and anything we can do to help, we want to help.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.