Shortly after he is sworn into office, on January 20, President-elect Donald Trump plans to launch a massive deportation operation targeting the estimated 11.5 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Texas, with its 1,254-mile southern border and pro-Trump leaders, will play a central role in any such deportations. Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has vowed that the administration will build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” likely on “open land in Texas near the border.” State land commissioner Dawn Buckingham recently offered the administration 1,400 acres in Starr County about 35 miles west of McAllen to build “deportation facilities.”
In their eagerness to help Trump conduct sweeping roundups of undocumented Texas workers and their families, state leaders who vociferously supported Trump’s candidacy have mostly avoided reckoning with the likely economic consequences of such roundups—including the impact on inflation, a major issue in the presidential campaign.
Earlier this month, Governor Greg Abbott said he expected the president-elect to begin by deporting immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States, but he would not say who he thinks should be expelled next under the far-reaching plan. “President Trump has made perfectly clear that this is a process and you have to have a priority list,” he said. “You begin with . . . the criminals.”
But Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—around one in every twenty residents—and the vast majority are not criminals. In fact, undocumented immigrants in our state commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than legal residents, according to a National Institute of Justice analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data. Many among these 1.6 million power the state’s construction, farming, and meatpacking industries and work as housekeepers, landscape gardeners, and restaurant workers.
Deporting every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally—or even half of them—would cripple the economy. And Texas would be hit harder than most states. A recent report by the left-leaning American Immigration Council estimated that a mass-deportation campaign would reduce the national GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent—a similar hit to the one the nation took during the Great Recession. The price of groceries would skyrocket. A gallon of milk, for instance, would cost twice as much without immigrant labor, according to a 2015 estimate from Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service. Mass deportations would also punch a hole in the state budget, because undocumented Texans pay an estimated $4.9 billion in sales and payroll taxes every year, including for retirement benefits they are ineligible to collect.
Trump has argued that deporting undocumented immigrants would open up jobs for American citizens. But the percentage of citizens willing to work in industries such as landscaping and construction has declined, and economic studies suggest that immigration, both legal and illegal, is a net benefit to the economy. Reducing illegal immigration likely would, over time, result in higher wages for legal workers in industries such as construction, assuming the supply of labor were to fall faster than demand. But suddenly removing a significant percentage of undocumented workers (one recent estimate found that 23 percent of construction workers nationally don’t have legal documents) would likely cause hundreds of building projects to stall, crops to go unharvested, and cattle to stack up in feedlots.
Trump’s program would also impose social costs on communities across Texas. According to the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country live in mixed-status households with at least one family member who is here legally. Expelling these migrants would separate families and decimate communities across the state. “The social, family, and economic impact would be very deep,” said Rice University political scientist Tony Payan. “It doesn’t make sense from any perspective. It would be madness for the U.S. to do that.”
Some Texas officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, have long supported mass deportation as a campaign platform while remaining vague about how such an operation would be executed and what the consequences might be for the Texas economy. In an attempt to get more specifics, Texas Monthly reached out to top Texas officials and every Republican state legislator to ask about the incoming president’s mass-deportation plan. We posed four questions:
- Do you support President Trump’s plan to deport all immigrants in the country illegally?
- How would you like the deportations to be carried out?
- Are you concerned about the potential economic damage to the Texas construction, farming, and restaurant industries from deporting undocumented immigrants? If so, how would you remedy that damage?
- Are you concerned about the family separations that will occur if all undocumented Texas are deported?
Only two legislators responded, though neither addressed our questions in full: state Senators Bryan Hughes and Lois Kolkhorst.
Kolkhorst represents a district roughly midway between Austin and Houston, whose population is about 31 percent Hispanic, compared with about 40 percent for all of Texas. She declined to address our questions about the economic impact of mass deportations on Texas and instead emphasized one of the relatively few violent crimes attributed to illegal immigrants—one homicide among hundreds committed each year by legal residents of the Houston area. “After recently meeting with Alexis Nungaray, the Houston mother of murdered teenager Jocelyn [Nungaray],” Kolkhorst wrote, “I am most concerned with the dangers of illegal immigration that are illustrated by her family’s tragic loss.”
Hughes, from Mineola, about 85 miles east of Dallas, represents a district with a population that is about 16 percent Hispanic. “We should prioritize those who pose the greatest threat to Americans,” Hughes wrote. “In Texas, state and local law enforcement will work with the relevant federal agencies. It will take some time to deport all illegal immigrants. This will give businesses time to recruit and hire citizens or legal immigrants for their workforces. Those with family connections are eligible to apply for U.S. citizenship, as millions have done for generations. Hopefully, concern for their families will encourage illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship and follow the legal process.”
Might Hughes be right? Might deportations take place in a slower and less comprehensive fashion than the one promised by Trump and Miller? Some well-connected Texas Republican lobbyists and industry leaders say, not for attribution, that’s what they expect. “I think Trump is going to treat his deportation promise the way he treated his promises about the border wall”—as an occasion for political theater, one veteran lobbyist said last week. “He’ll stage photo ops”—as he often did beside sections of the wall, which he never came close to completing—“but I don’t think he’s going to risk tanking the economy during his first months back in office.”
The following officials and sitting legislators did not respond to Texas Monthly’s questions.
Statewide
Governor Greg Abbott
Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick
Attorney General Ken Paxton
U.S. Senator John Cornyn
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz
Texas House of Representatives
Steve Allison
Trent Ashby
Ernest Bailes
Keith Bell
Cecil Bell Jr.
Greg Bonnen
Brad Buckley
Ben Bumgarner
DeWayne Burns
Dustin Burrows
Angie Chen Button
Briscoe Cain
Giovanni Capriglione
Travis Clardy
David Cook
Tom Craddick
Charles Cunningham
Drew Darby
Caroline Harris Davila
Mano DeAyala
Jay Dean
Mark Dorazio
Jill Dutton
James Frank
Frederick Frazier
Gary Gates
Stan Gerdes
Charlie Geren
Craig Goldman
Ryan Guillen
E. Sam Harless
Cody Harris
Brian Harrison
Richard Hayes
Cole Hefner
Justin Holland
Lacey Hull
Todd Hunter
Carrie Isaac
Jacey Jetton
Kyle Kacal
Ken King
Stan Kitzman
Stephanie Klick
John Kuempel
Stan Lambert
Brooks Landgraf
Jeff Leach
Terri Leo Wilson
Janie Lopez
J. M. Lozano
John Lujan
Will Metcalf
Morgan Meyer
Geanie W. Morrison
Andrew S. Murr
Candy Noble
Tom Oliverson
Angelia Orr
Jared Patterson
Dennis Paul
Dade Phelan
Four Price
John Raney
Glenn Rogers
Matt Schaefer
Nate Schatzline
Mike Schofield
Matt Shaheen
Hugh D. Shine
Shelby Slawson
Reggie Smith
John Smithee
David Spiller
Lynn Stucky
Valoree Swanson
Carl Tepper
Kronda Thimesch
Ed Thompson
Tony Tinderholt
Steve Toth
Ellen Troxclair
Gary VanDeaver
Cody Thane Vasut
Terry M. Wilson
Texas Senate
Paul Bettencourt
Brian Birdwell
Donna Campbell
Brandon Creighton
Pete Flores
Bob Hall
Kelly Hancock
Joan Huffman
Phil King
Mayes Middleton
Robert Nichols
Tan Parker
Angela Paxton
Charles Perry
Charles Schwertner
Kevin Sparks
Drew Springer
If any readers would like to try their luck at getting answers from their elected representatives, the phone numbers and emails at which state officials can be reached are available here.
Sarah Brager, Angela Lim, and Jasmine Wright contributed reporting for this story.
