Texas has decided to play real estate agent for the incoming Trump administration, offering up 1,400 acres near the border for the historic mass deportations.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham wrote to President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday, pitching the idea of turning the former ranch into shiny new “deportation facilities” — nothing says Texas hospitality like a one-way ticket out of the country.
In the letter, Buckingham proudly declared, “My office is fully prepared to enter into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the United States Border Patrol to build a facility for processing, detention, and coordinating the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.” What a sales pitch.
The state snagged the land last month to construct a 1.5-mile border wall segment about 35 miles west of McAllen. According to Buckingham, the previous ranch owner wasn’t a fan of the wall and “actively blocked law enforcement from accessing the property.” (Honestly, respect.)
Anyway, it’s all for Trump’s use, now. “We’re happy to make this offer and hope they take us up on it,” Buckingham told Fox News.
Currently, the land is a farm growing onions, sunflowers, cotton, and other crops, and a press release boasted that it has thus far helped generate revenue for Texas schools.
National eyes have been on Texas leaders as they’ve courted Trump, auditioning for cabinet positions while the incoming presidential administration is shopping for ways to expand its deportation empire. NBC News reported that the federal government plans to double the 41,000 detention beds ICE currently uses, because apparently, beds are the bottleneck in deporting people. Trump, who reportedly visited the Rio Grande Valley on Wednesday to witness a SpaceX test flight, has also confirmed that he intends to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military to aid in the deportations starting on the first day of his new tenure.
Armando Sanchez, a 77-year-old Brownsville resident and naturalized citizen (who gained amnesty under the Reagan administration), told the Texas Tribune this week he wasn’t sold on the incoming president’s plan: “If you throw those people out, who’s going to work?” Sanchez said. “You don’t see a white man laboring out in the sun. On the other hand, Mexicans, foreigners, people from other countries — that’s why they come here, to work.”
Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration policy adviser — whose previous work involved separating thousands of parents from their children at the border to deter illegal crossings — envisions “vast holding facilities” for immigrants. He told the New York Times these would serve as staging centers for immigrants waiting for flights out of the country.
As of May, more than 1,400 children were still separated from their families following the use of a ruthless policy that inflicted trauma and fear on children as young as four months old. Trump, who recently nominated the policy’s original architect to the position of “border czar,” previously boasted to CNN about the effects of family separation: “It stopped people from coming by the hundreds of thousands,” he said, “because when they hear ‘family separation,’ they say, ‘Well, we better not go.’ And they didn’t go.”
It appears leaders in Texas are all too ready to trade onions for detention centers, all in the name of making deportation history.
