Summary
- Texas has spent decades providing extensive manpower and resources for border enforcement.
- Democrats’ victories in Texas portend a reversal in the state’s border policies.
- The shift could leave federal authorities with fewer resources along the Texas-Mexico border.
AUSTIN, Texas—Operation Linebacker. Operation Rio Grande. Operation Border Star. Operation River Watch. Operation Strong Safety. Operation Secure Texas.
Those names cover more than 20 years of state-led operations along the 1,254-mile Texas-Mexico frontier. Successive Republican governors and Republican-majority legislatures in Texas ordered all these operations. They also ordered “Operation Lone Star (OLS),” which is in its fifth year and has thus far cost $11 billion. It is credited as an impactful backstop to the Trump administration’s border security campaign that ended a four-year mass migration crisis.
But the recent midterm elections of Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa and Lt. Gov.-elect Vikki Goodwin, both the first Democrats to hold those high offices in decades, portends a U-turn from the federal partnership and toward “sanctuary state” policies that help illegal aliens get in and stay in.
Neither winner has announced specific border policies since the election. But as state legislators and candidates, both often voiced views that, if implemented, would probably mean significant withdrawal from Texas’ partnerships with Trump’s Border Patrol on the border and inland with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arresting deportable aliens. (Texas is home to the nation’s second-largest illegal alien population).
U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials are concerned enough to order “worst-case scenario” plans, a top U.S. Customs and Border Protection official disclosed to me.
“We have a direct tactical relationship with Texas. They provide us with enormous resources,” the official said. “We’re very concerned about those resources not being available to us anymore.”
As part of its federal relationship, Texas has deployed several thousand Texas National Guard soldiers who man the line alongside Border Patrol agents and regular U.S. Army troops. Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, helicopters, surveillance drones, watercraft, and SWAT teams are on call for Border Patrol to chase fleeing suspects, seize drugs, bust smugglers for state prosecution, and fill gaps in the line. The state also provides tactical intelligence from seven operations centers along the border.
Among the state’s most valuable contributions is Operation Drawbridge, which involves at least 9,000 motion-detecting game cameras that alert Border Patrol, allowing them to respond within minutes after they are triggered.
As for ICE operations, some Texas state troopers and jailers are deputized to arrest illegal aliens for ICE, while others coordinate traffic stops with ICE to facilitate arrests anywhere.
“Texas is a huge force multiplier. It’s massive,” said Mike Banks, an architect of Trump’s border closure (while serving as Trump’s Chief of Border Patrol) and previous Texas Border Czar. “Without the troopers, if they get past us, they’re gone but right now they have to get past the state. And [Hinojosa] can shut down everything the troopers and rangers are doing.”
Open Borders, Anti-ICE Ideology
Both Gov.-elect Hinojosa and Lt. Gov.-elect Goodwin are vocal and consistent critics of OLS. They’ve also suggested they’d like to see illegal aliens left alone.
Hinojosa voted against the first round of OLS appropriations in 2021 and has remained a critic.
“What has happened is we’ve spent billions of dollars in this state … to detain immigrants, to police for immigrants,” she recently said on local television. “That was not a plan to keep us safe; we need a review of Operation Lone Star.”
Both leaders seem to favor welcoming illegal immigrants without consequence. When President Joe Biden’s mass-release policies unleashed a chaotic rush on the border in 2021, Hinojosa praised those policies for “restoring order and humanity at the border.”
In 2018, Goodwin posted a campaign blog post in which she suggested that Cuban and Haitian “entrants” as well as “survivors of human trafficking” should be allowed to resettle with no consequences. (She incorrectly referred to them as “refugees”).
“The goal is to integrate them into their new communities as quickly as possible,” she wrote of Cuban and Haitian entrants. “As I heard on the radio the other day, people are not illegal; they are human. Let’s all be human and welcome refugees here. Allow them to escape war or persecution in their home countries.”
When Texas Republicans rolled out OLS during the Biden crisis, Goodwin repeatedly demanded spending reductions and condemned the operation as inhumane.
“I think there’s a better way, a more humanitarian way. They certainly wouldn’t choose to cross a river that’s bordered by razor wire,” Goodwin lamented to a radio host to whom she also recommended that the billions spent on OLS should go to “infrastructure to help people enter Texas legally.”
She complained that a floating water barrier the state put near Eagle Pass was intended “to keep desperate people from entering the U.S. in Texas” even if it killed people, she blogged on her campaign website in August 2023. “Operation Lone Star is failing us. What I saw in the U.S. side horrified me. It can only be described as a militarized zone.”
Goodwin’s and Hinojosa’s voting records demonstrate their sentiments toward illegal immigrants, even those who have committed crimes. In 2025, both voted against “Jocelyn’s Law,” an amendment that would have denied bail to illegal aliens charged with violent crimes. In 2023, Goodwin and Hinojosa voted against Texas Senate Bill 4, which criminalized illegal entry into Texas.
As for the state assisting ICE, Hinojosa spoke at anti-ICE rallies harshly painting the deportation program as corrupt, abusive, and murderous. Goodwin also rarely missed a chance to criticize ICE.
“I will never offer up Texas as a staging ground for operations that terrorize families and enrich [Abbott’s] donors,” Hinojosa said at one rally.
Consequences of a Texas Blue Wave
The Trump administration’s Border Patrol agents and ICE officers have proven they can effectively operate in other blue border states without dedicated state police backup. In losing Texas, the administration should be able to compensate for the losses and mostly deter mass migration eruptions for the final two years of the Trump presidency.
But more people and drugs are probably going to get through. That’s because the Texas border is longer and more complex than other blue state borders. The truth is that federal agencies need all the help they can get in a place like Texas.
But that’s the optimistic part. If the next president is soft on immigration, with these two running Texas, no barrier at all would stand between the entire Mexican border and all 50 states.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
