Earlier this year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott appeared on the radio show of former National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch to discuss Operation Lone Star, his $11 billion border crackdown. “We are deploying every tool and strategy that we possibly can,” Abbott boasted. “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
Not everyone shares Abbott’s sense of restraint. National Guard troops participating in Operation Lone Star have shot across the border on at least two occasions, wounding two people. Vigilantes riled up by immigrant bashing have committed mass shootings across the state and country. In 2019, a white supremacist from the Dallas suburb of Allen shot 23 people and wounded 22 more at a Walmart in El Paso, a city that is more than 80 percent Hispanic. In a manifesto, the shooter described himself as a defender of American values against “the Hispanic invasion of Texas”—language similar to that used by Abbott and many other Texas officials to describe illegal immigration.
If the poor migrants who have been straggling across the Rio Grande for decades represent an invasion force, they might comprise the least effective army in history. Many immediately surrender to the first American officials they encounter. The rest typically find work building homes or cooking food for their sworn enemies, paying billions of dollars in taxes to the country they are supposedly trying to destroy. Yet many Texans persist in seeing the workers who power our economy as the enemy within, gnawing away at our collective self-reliance. Those migrants should be grateful, our governor implies, that we don’t shoot them on sight.
Abbott’s not-so-veiled threat raises an obvious question: What would Texas do to undocumented migrants if the pesky federal government weren’t threatening it with legal action? The matter isn’t hypothetical. Three months from now, Donald Trump could well be back in the White House. During his first term, according to a book by New York Times reporters Michael Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, Trump suggested shooting border crossers in the legs (Trump has denied the reporting). “Texas is an innovator in immigration-based authoritarianism,” said political scientist Jacob Grumbach, author of Laboratories Against Democracy: How National Parties Transformed State Politics. “In this era, what states like Texas do really presages what the national party will do with power.”
Immigration policy is merely the most obvious area in which Texas will likely serve as the model for a second, far more radical Trump administration. For years, the state has been a testing ground for right-wing policies. Like other Republican-led states, such as Florida, it has clamped down on free speech, banned diversity and equity initiatives, imposed a whitewashed view of history on schoolchildren, and forced state contractors to sign a pro-Israel pledge. Additionally, Governor Greg Abbott has centralized power to an unprecedented degree, overturning countless local ordinances and seizing control of the state’s largest school district. Attorney General Ken Paxton has targeted the Democratic Party, Catholic charities, voting-rights groups, and the parents of transgender children. Trump is reportedly considering Paxton to run the Department of Justice.
“Trump is clearly drawn to the Texas model,” said Southern Methodist University political scientist Cal Jillson. Last year, Trump held a 12,000-person rally in Waco—during the thirtieth anniversary of the deadly Branch Davidian standoff—to kick off his 2024 presidential campaign. Many of his closest allies are Texan. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, whose controversial Project 2025 provides a road map for Trump’s second term, led a Texas think tank before going national. In July, Roberts appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast to say that the country was “in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” Dozens of former Trump administration officials contributed to Project 2025, undermining Trump’s attempts to distance himself from it.
What is the Texas model? Under governors George W. Bush and Rick Perry, who led the state for a combined two decades, the answer seemed clear. The state’s system of low taxes, low costs, and pro-business policies had made it an economic dynamo. Millions of Americans flocked here, seeking good jobs and warm weather. “Texas is, despite its rhetorical flare-ups, a pragmatic and largely reasonable state,” argued Houston Chronicle business reporter (and former Texas Monthly writer) Erica Grieder in her 2013 book, Big, Hot, Cheap and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas. At the time, Grieder could even boast that the state “has maintained one of the nation’s most moderate policies toward unauthorized immigration.”
That may have been true under Governor Perry, who supported charging in-state college tuition to the children of undocumented immigrants—a stance that helped cost him the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. But under Perry’s successor, Texas took a turn. Elected in 2014, just two years before Trump became president, Abbott has embraced conspiracy theories and the most extreme elements of the GOP base. Just a few months after taking office, Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor a U.S. military training exercise known as Jade Helm 15. Conspiracy theorists, including Alex Jones, were warning gullible Texans that the exercise was a cover for President Obama to declare martial law and round up citizens.
Abbott’s capitulation to the crazies on Jade Helm signaled the beginning of the far right’s dominance of Texas politics. Even as the state as a whole has become steadily more purple, the Republican party has lurched to the fringe, passing a near-total abortion ban and allowing citizens 21 and older to openly carry handguns without licenses or training. The moderate business leaders who previously held sway in Austin have been supplanted by apocalyptic culture warriors, including Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, who want to turn the state into a Christian theocracy. The far right hasn’t gotten everything it wants—school vouchers remain out of reach for now—but it is clearly ascendant.
It is this Texas—paranoid, angry, violent, and intolerant—that appeals to Trump. Whether by praising the siccing of police on peaceful protesters, promising to roll back protections for transgender students, or pledging to ban “unsecure” election drop boxes and “ballot harvesting,” Trump is singing from the Texas hymnal.
In September of 2023, Abbott officially declared an invasion at the southern border, claiming the right to defend the state by force. When the Biden administration pushed back on Texas’s border-enforcement efforts through the courts a few months later, Trump jumped to Abbott’s defense. “Texas has rightly invoked the Invasion Clause of the Constitution, and must be given full support to repel the invasion,” he wrote on Truth Social. During a rally in Eagle Pass in February, Trump praised Operation Lone Star. “You’re in a war,” he told the Texas troops patrolling the border.
Just as Abbott has turned the Texas Army National Guard into his private border security force, Trump plans to use local police, the National Guard, and possibly other U.S. military personnel to carry out his deportation orders. “For people that live on the border, there’s going to be even more militarization and even more National Guard,” said Matthew Simpson, a senior policy strategist at the ACLU of Texas. “Not only is Trump going to pick up Abbott’s model, he’s perhaps going to literally step into the facilities our state has built.”
Some immigration experts are skeptical that Trump will carry out his mass deportation, or that such a massive operation is logistically possible. Others argue that Trump wouldn’t risk the economic consequences of ejecting the 12 million undocumented immigrants estimated to be living in the U.S. “That would place quite a few industries under stress,” said Tony Payan, director of the Center for the U.S. and Mexico at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “Particularly in industries that rely on a lot of those workers—construction, agriculture, food processing, hospitality, landscaping, cleaning service.”
In addition to tearing millions of families apart, mass deportation would almost certainly devastate the Texas economy. State political leaders, including Abbott, have traditionally talked tough on the border while doing little to stop businesses from hiring undocumented workers. But if Trump decides to crack down on employers hiring undocumented labor, will Abbott really stand in his way? If the president sends Customs and Border Protection officers into major Texas cities to search for migrants to arrest, will the governor resist? It seems far more likely that if Trump does try to purge Texas of undocumented immigrants, Abbott will be right at his side. After all, he showed Trump the way.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, a portion of your purchase goes to independent bookstores and Texas Monthly receives a commission. Thank you for supporting our journalism.
