The Texas governor gained national attention by busing migrants to Democratic cities. Now he’s paving the way for President Trump’s mass-deportation campaign.
The Wall Ranch, in Eagle Pass, Texas, occupies a thousand acres of scrubland along the Mexican border. Several times a day, freight trains coming from Mexico stop on the southern edge of the property, where a large X-ray machine scans the cars to check if people are hiding inside. One morning in early January, the ranch’s owner, Martín Wall, a forty-five-year-old cattleman and a seventh-generation Texan, showed me around. Between 2022 and 2023, he said, more than two hundred migrants crossed through his land each day to board the trains and travel farther north. Discarded clothes and trash piled up in the brush. A tractor was vandalized. Wire fences that Wall had erected to keep his cattle from wandering into the road were repeatedly cut. Once, Wall came inside for lunch and found two men in his kitchen. “Hell, you can grab their phones and they have pins,” he told me. “They have my house marked.”
We were sitting in Wall’s pickup truck. The muzzle of a hunting rifle poked out from the back seat, and a water bottle on the front console was filled with the brown swill of chewing tobacco. Wall, who is tall and burly, with long hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, told me that he’d spent more than three hundred thousand dollars making repairs on the ranch. “I’ve been totally crippled by this,” he said. The problem began “as soon as Biden went in. We got forgotten about down here.”
By the end of last year, the number of migrants arriving at the border was at its lowest ebb since 2020, owing in large part to a dramatic increase in apprehensions in Mexico, and a series of stricter policies adopted in the final months of the Biden Administration. In February, after Donald Trump’s first month back in office, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded fewer encounters with migrants than at any other time in at least a quarter century. But Wall, who flies a large Trump flag at the entrance to his ranch, attributed the change to a single person: Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas.
In the spring of 2021, Abbott announced that Texas would “not be an accomplice to the open border policies” of the Biden Administration. He issued a disaster declaration and launched an eleven-billion-dollar enforcement crackdown called Operation Lone Star. Thousands of state troopers from the Department of Public Safety were dispatched to arrest migrants in the borderlands. The Texas National Guard placed floating buoys in the Rio Grande to make it harder to swim across, and strung up more than a hundred miles of razor wire to ensnare anyone who did. Both moves prompted federal lawsuits. “The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border,” Abbott said in a radio interview. “Because, of course, the Biden Administration would charge us with murder.”
The following spring, Abbott began busing migrants to New York, Chicago, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. More than a hundred thousand people arrived in those cities as a result—an influx that overwhelmed government resources, stoked local resentments, and deepened divisions among Democrats. Abbott’s strategy was to inflict the pain felt by constituents like Wall on liberal voters who lived far from the border. In response, congressional Democrats backed legislation to increase border security and restrict asylum. When the Biden White House asked other cities to help take in migrants, local officials privately told the President’s aides they were worried that Abbott would target them next. A senior Biden Administration official told me, “Greg Abbott single-handedly changed the national politics around immigration.”
The federal government has the sole authority to enforce the country’s immigration laws. But Biden, Abbott said, had “broken the compact between the United States and the States” by failing to enforce immigration laws passed by Congress. When Biden stopped construction on Trump’s border wall, Abbott directed his state to keep building. Invoking Article I of the Constitution, he declared that the state had been “invaded” and therefore had the “authority to defend and protect itself.”
Last January, on orders from Abbott, the state seized control of Shelby Park, a public plot in Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. Border Patrol agents, who had long operated inside the park, were barred. The following month, with the Presidential campaign under way, Trump gave a speech alongside Abbott in front of the park’s razor-wire fences. Abbott was a “spectacular man,” Trump said afterward. More than a dozen Republican governors, in a show of support for Abbott, had sent their own guardsmen to the border. When I visited Shelby Park recently, with a chaperon from the Texas National Guard, an airboat from Florida still floated in the water.
Martín Wall’s ranch had become ground zero for Operation Lone Star. He and his wife were among the first landowners to agree to let state troopers onto their property. The Department of Public Safety was “our Border Patrol,” Wall told me. National Republicans treated Eagle Pass like it was the site of a partisan pilgrimage. Senators visited, as did the Speaker of the House and Elon Musk, who’d recently moved to Texas himself. Wall and I got out of his truck and walked through a grove of mesquite trees. Dense coils of concertina wire snaked through the brush. Without Abbott, Wall said, “my family wouldn’t still be here.”
On January 20th, the day of Trump’s second Inauguration, the President was telling an overflow crowd at the Capitol how he’d won—immigration was his “No. 1 issue,” he said—when he caught sight of Abbott. The Governor, a paraplegic who has used a wheelchair since an accident in his twenties, was sitting toward the back of the audience, in a dark suit. At sixty-seven, he has a full head of wispy gray hair, a muted speaking style, and an air of conventionality which belies his far-right politics. “We couldn’t get you up in the front row?” Trump asked, with a grin.
Abbott, who is in his third term as governor and is poised to run for a fourth, is an unlikely MAGA hero. He has spent three decades in government, first as a justice on the state Supreme Court and then as the longest-serving attorney general in Texas history. In style, he is the antithesis of the President—highly scripted and canny. “He’s not flashy or well spoken,” Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who ran against Abbott for governor in 2022, told me. “He’s rarely memorable.” State politicians tend to describe Abbott as a run-of-the-mill Republican who once had more in common with the Chamber of Commerce than with the Party’s raucous, populist base. As one Democratic operative in Texas put it, “He could always associate himself with the bomb throwers and not ever look like one.”
Texas is home to about thirty-one million people, but statewide elections are effectively decided by just one and a half million of them—the average turnout in the Republican primary. In the past decade, as that constituency moved right, Abbott refashioned himself as a conservative crusader and a culture warrior. He has signed some of the country’s harshest anti-abortion bills, restricted the rights of transgender people, and fought diversity initiatives at state universities. Since the COVID pandemic, Abbott has made liberal use of the governor’s power to declare statewide emergencies, which has allowed him to circumvent judicial and legislative checks. His longevity in office has conferred additional powers: thousands of state officials owe their jobs to Abbott appointments, and his campaign war chest, which dwarfs those of his closest rivals, has brought him to the edge of political invincibility. “He’s a tough motherfucker, and don’t believe otherwise,” Bill Miller, a Republican lobbyist, told me. “As governor, he has begun exercising power in a way that’s not previously been seen.”
Last year, in a move that was unprecedented in the history of Texas politics, Abbott attacked reliable members of his own party. Twenty-one Republicans in the state House had broken with him on a policy that he’d elevated as a priority in the 2023 legislative session: vouchers for religious schools, an issue known among supporters as “school choice.” Conservatives aren’t usually strong opponents of vouchers, but in Texas’s rural communities public schools are often both the only option for students and a major source of local employment. The state, where some six million students attend public schools, ranks near the bottom in education funding nationally. Each time a bill to establish a statewide voucher system has come up in the House, it has failed; the 2023 legislative session was no different.
For most of Abbott’s career, he had barely mentioned the issue, but a few things had changed. Frustration with public schools during the pandemic, one of the Governor’s advisers told me, had begun to “turn the tide” in favor of “parents’ rights.” The state’s top political fund-raisers—a pair of Christian nationalists—were bankrolling the effort. So were out-of-state donors like the TikTok investor Jeff Yass, from Pennsylvania, who contributed more than six million dollars, and a group affiliated with Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former Education Secretary, which added another four million dollars.
After the bill was defeated, Abbott called a special session, forcing lawmakers to return to the capitol to weigh his proposal for a second time. The Governor, according to one of his top staffers, “was out there saying, ‘We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Pass this thing or I’m going to go after you.’ ” Hugh Shine, a Republican in the House who voted against the voucher measure, told me, “My colleagues and I were with the governor 99.9 per cent of the time. When I came up, in the Reagan years, I was told, If someone’s with you eighty per cent of the time, they’re your friend.” When the legislation again failed in the special session, Abbott targeted the bill’s Republican opponents with primary challengers, not only campaigning with them but flooding the districts with ads. The attacks themselves, though, had little to do with vouchers. “He accused us of being weak on the border, that we were weak on property taxes, that we wanted to raise taxes,” Steve Allison, a Republican from San Antonio, said. “That was absolutely false.”
When eleven of the incumbents targeted by Abbott—including Shine and Allison—lost or dropped their candidacies the following year, Abbott said, “The overall message from this year’s primaries is clear: Texans want school choice.” The vast sums of money that Abbott unleashed, along with his zero-sum assessment of political loyalty, has proved persuasive. The measure is almost certain to pass this year. “He had to flex his muscles,” Miller said. “Make people respect you, which is really what it’s all about. The rule is: nothing succeeds like success.”
Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations face a number of logistical obstacles. The Department of Homeland Security lacks the resources to detain and deport undocumented immigrants at a scale that meets the President’s ambitions. Any path to achieving his aims runs through Texas. At the U.S. Capitol in January, Trump went off on a tangent about the border wall but kept returning to Abbott, praising him for his actions on immigration. “You didn’t do that for politics—you did it because you wanted to do the right thing,” Trump said. “But it sure as hell worked for politics.” Abbott beamed. By way of reply, he mouthed, “Self-preservation.”
July 14, 1984, was a muggy, overcast day in Houston. Abbott, then twenty-six and studying for the Texas bar exam, decided to go for a run. He and his wife, Cecilia, who’d been married for three years, were living a couple of miles from downtown, where Abbott was due to start a job as an associate at one of the city’s most prestigious law firms. “Running was a refreshing break from sitting at a desk,” Abbott later wrote in a memoir. He had been a competitive runner in high school; in college, at the University of Texas, and then in law school, at Vanderbilt, he jogged obsessively. On this particular afternoon, his study partner joined him, and they ran side by side on the streets of a leafy, affluent neighborhood.
After about a mile, the sidewalk narrowed. Abbott went ahead. A loud crack rang out, and Abbott was knocked to the ground. A giant oak tree in the front yard of a divorce attorney had collapsed on him. “The good news was that I was still conscious,” he later wrote. “The bad news was that I had not lost consciousness.” While his friend sprinted off to call an ambulance, Abbott, lying on his back, remembered a movie that he and Cecilia had recently watched about a man who’d been paralyzed in a tragic accident. “If that ever happened to me,” Abbott had told her, “just put me to death.”
Abbott had grown up in a family of modest means in East Texas, before moving, as a young teen-ager, with his churchgoing parents and his brother to Duncanville, a small suburb of Dallas. His father died of a heart attack when Abbott was sixteen, and his mother went to work as a real-estate agent to support the family. Abbott mowed lawns and stocked shelves at a general store after school. A scholarship from the Duncanville Police Department helped him get through college. The night before his accident, Abbott and his wife had attended a lavish gala hosted by his law firm. As he later put it, “This was the beginning of the life we’d been striving for.”
Abbott spent ten days in intensive care, and another month in the hospital. Surgeons had to remove bone fragments from his back, fuse together his damaged vertebrae, and insert two steel rods along his spine. Eventually, he regained use of his arms and his hands, but he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. “Think about how young they were,” a close family friend told me. “Cecilia was twenty-four when he had his accident. That’s young to be figuring out all the things—the hospitals and all that.”
Colleagues at Abbott’s law firm introduced him to a well-regarded personal-injury attorney named Don Riddle, who agreed to represent him when other lawyers had refused. “Look at the bare facts,” Riddle told me. “A tree falls on a young man and paralyzes him. That doesn’t look like much of a case. Who are you going to collect against?”
It turned out that the homeowner had hired a deep-pocketed company to inspect the tree, which was rotted at its core. “Things got better once we did discovery,” Riddle said. He remembered Abbott as upbeat, pleasant, and not the least bit self-pitying: “One of the things he said early on was ‘I will walk again.’ He was very confident.” When Riddle eventually secured a lucrative settlement in the case, Abbott wanted it all in cash. “He never had any money, so the few million that they were willing to put up looked like a lot,” Riddle told me. He persuaded Abbott to opt for a structured settlement, worth the equivalent of eight million dollars, with tax-free payments accruing for the rest of his life.
Abbott’s work ethic has always been a personal point of pride. In his memoir, he recalls taking the bar exam in a wheelchair, in July, 1985, only a year after his accident, and going to work at his law firm each day in a body brace, arriving before his colleagues and leaving after them. In the courtroom, he fashioned himself as a tenacious litigator. At one point, he represented a hospital sued by a man who alleged an injury in a “slip and fall incident.” During a tense cross-examination, the man rushed from the witness box and beat Abbott’s wheelchair with his cane. “I was on my way,” Abbott wrote. A few years later, when Abbott was thirty-four, he was elected as a district judge in Harris County, where he earned a reputation as a fair-minded jurist with a doctrinaire conservative bent. The Texas Association of Civil Trial and Appellate Specialists voted him Trial Judge of the Year.
The nineties were a period of political realignment in Texas. Since Reconstruction, the state had been run by Democrats, though intraparty fissures grew throughout the sixties and seventies. “Republicans were in the Democratic Party, because there was only one party,” Ann Richards, the last Democrat to serve as the state’s governor, once said. “We wanted them out of the Democratic Party, and they got out in spades.” In 1994, George W. Bush upset Richards in the governor’s race. Eight years later, Republicans won the state House for the first time since 1872. The new Republican speaker, Tom Craddick, partnered with Tom DeLay, a former exterminator from Sugar Land who’d become the Majority Whip in the U.S. House, to force through a redistricting plan that put Republicans on a path to long-term dominance in the state. “Texas became a model for how to get control,” Craddick later said, as my colleague Lawrence Wright wrote in his book “God Save Texas.”
The architect of the Republican takeover was Karl Rove, who served as a top adviser to Governor Bush. In 1995, when a vacancy opened on the state Supreme Court, Rove suggested that Bush invite Abbott to the governor’s mansion for a meeting. “He’s young, he’s Republican, and he’s in a wheelchair,” Rove told him. According to Texas Monthly, Bush was impressed by Abbott’s positive outlook on life after the accident. Rove said, “I knew when he finished, he was the guy Bush was looking for.”
In Texas, Supreme Court justices are elected, and Abbott demonstrated an immediate facility for the more overtly political elements of the job. He published a newsletter called The Abbott Advisor, which provided updates on the court’s activities, and he routinely gave speeches to Republican groups across the state. Colleagues and political insiders consider him to be the best fund-raiser in Texas history. Abbott raised close to three hundred million dollars in his first decade as governor, according to ProPublica. This may be a function of his trademark persistence rather than of tact. When one donor cut him a six-figure check, Abbott replied, “Now you’re in my top one hundred closest friends.” Someone recalled a meeting in which another donor handed Abbott an envelope containing his contribution. “He couldn’t wait to tear that envelope open,” the person told me. “I’ve delivered a million checks to a million people. The one thing that’s gauche is to open the check. He does that.”
Abbott’s judicial philosophy tracked with the prevailing views of mainstream Republicans. But one issue was awkward for him personally. Like Bush, he was a proponent of tort reform, a Republican-led effort to fight “frivolous lawsuits” by capping the dollar amounts of personal damages won in civil court. When asked about his own sizable payout, Abbott maintained that he wasn’t trying to block legitimate injury claims. Riddle considered the argument disingenuous. Tort-reform advocates were backed by powerful interest groups, such as the Texas Association of Business and Texans for Lawsuit Reform, which was made up of large insurers, doctors, construction companies, and retailers. “Frivolous cases were not their enemy,” Riddle said. “Good, honest cases were the ones that the insurance companies had a problem with.”
Riddle and Abbott had become friends in the years after Riddle handled his case. To their mutual amusement, Riddle once argued a case before Abbott in court. But their friendship soured “around the time that the tort-reform thing came along,” Riddle told me. “If Abbott’s case had come along after the reform of the tort system, we could not have achieved a settlement like the one we got.” He and Abbott never spoke again.
In 1997, most states required sitting judges to resign before running for nonjudicial office. That year, every member of the Texas Supreme Court voted to adopt such a policy—except Abbott. When he left the court, in 2001, to run for attorney general, roughly a quarter of the money that he raised for his campaign came from groups such as Texans for Lawsuit Reform, Texas Monthly reported. He outspent his opponent, won handily, and held on to the office for the next thirteen years.
As attorney general, Abbott took a number of positions that would surprise his present-day supporters. He opposed a legislative proposal to tax remittances sent home by immigrants living in Texas and a push to end birthright citizenship. According to Texas Public Radio, his office brought more than seventy cases against fraudsters who preyed on undocumented immigrants. In 2007, when Texas legislators tried to pass a series of bills toughening the state’s treatment of undocumented immigrants, Abbott blocked the effort, saying that such enforcement was “not Texas’s job” but, rather, that of the federal government.
In other areas, Abbott confirmed his partisan bona fides. In 2003, he named Ted Cruz, then a former Justice Department lawyer, as the state’s solicitor general. Three years later, he created an investigative unit to uncover instances of voter fraud. Despite a $1.5-million investment, his office struggled to find any serious perpetrators; instead, it pursued people such as Gloria Meeks, a sixty-nine-year-old Black woman from Fort Worth who had helped a neighbor vote by mail. Meeks had failed to include her name and her signature on the back of her neighbor’s ballot, prompting two agents from Abbott’s office to visit her at home. In a sworn statement, Meeks said that the agents “peeped into my bathroom window not once but twice while I was in my bathroom drying off from my bath.”
Texas politicians have a rich tradition of resisting the federal government, but Abbott may have done more than anyone else to professionalize the practice. This was partly a result of a new dynamic in Washington, where Congress was growing increasingly polarized. After Republicans retook the House in 2010, the view among conservatives was that President Barack Obama was overstepping his powers out of frustration with congressional inaction. “Now we have the President acting like a king,” Abbott said at the time. One study found that Republican attorneys general took part in legal challenges against the federal government just five times during Bill Clinton’s Presidency; in the first seven years of the Obama Administration, they intervened ninety-seven times. Texas was at the center of at least thirty of these cases while Abbott was attorney general. “I go into the office in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go home,” he liked to say.
By 2016, the attorney general’s office had spent more than six million dollars suing the White House. When critics in Texas objected to the cost, Abbott told his staff, “Don’t read the paper, don’t become victim to someone else’s narrative,” John Scott, a deputy attorney general at the time, told me. Abbott’s office sued the White House over the Affordable Care Act, environmental regulations, transgender rights, education policy, and immigration enforcement. In 2014, during Abbott’s final month as attorney general, he challenged a federal program called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA, which would have shielded some five million people from deportation. A judge in the Southern District of Texas ultimately ruled in favor of the state.
Abbott often based his legal arguments on an obscure statute called the Administrative Procedure Act, which allowed federal judges to block policies for being “arbitrary” and “capricious.” During Trump’s first term, invoking the Administrative Procedure Act became the primary means by which Democratic attorneys general, as well as groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, halted the President’s policies. Republicans took the same approach once Biden entered the White House. But before Abbott, Scott told me, “nobody had ever really done that.” To justify Texas’s standing in such cases, Abbott’s attorneys solicited comments from state officials affected by the President’s policies. “We went to state agencies and said, ‘This is how it’s going to affect you,’ ’’ Daniel Hodge, then a top deputy in the office, said. “We inserted ourselves as a check and balance.”
The headquarters of Abbott’s political operation is on the third floor of a nondescript building a few blocks from the capitol, in Austin. When I visited, earlier this year, campaign paraphernalia decorated the walls, and Abbott-family Christmas cards were piled on a table in the lobby, underneath a large photo of Trump after last year’s assassination attempt, his face spattered with blood. I was there to meet the most influential political operative in Texas, who, luckily for me, was in town. Dave Carney, Abbott’s top adviser, lives in New Hampshire. Since 1997, he has commuted to Austin every other week. “I never thought of moving,” he said. “Texas is hot as hell, and they have snakes.”
Carney, who’s sixty-five, is more than six feet tall, heavyset, and profane, with a gray goatee and a rumpled appearance. He served as the White House political director under President George H. W. Bush and is credited with helping Republicans win back the Senate in 1994. A Bush Cabinet member once described him as “temperamental and a bit nuts, but he defines action—he gets stuff done.” In 1998, Carney ran Rick Perry’s successful bid for lieutenant governor. Perry, a former agriculture commissioner and state legislator, went on to serve three terms as governor. Now, with Abbott on the eve of a fourth term, Carney has been the main adviser to the two longest-serving governors in the state’s history.
Perry and Abbott are a study in contrasts. Perry was, as Carney put it, “a chitchatter,” magnetic and outgoing, with a talent for remembering names and relating to people. “When he would meet with someone, there would be a ten-minute conversation, trying to find one thing that you and he had in common,” Carney said. Abbott’s chief characteristic, on the other hand, is lawyerly discipline. “He reads every bill before he signs it, which is unusual,” Carney said. Because of a quirk in the state’s legislative schedule, that amounts to some eleven hundred bills in roughly twenty days. “He does find stuff, and he’ll put a note on it,” Carney said. “That’s one of the things about Abbott. He thinks everything is going to go to court, and so, the things that he cares about, he’s literally hyper-focussed on making sure that it will pass constitutional scrutiny.”
In 2014, most of liberal America was familiar with Abbott’s opponent in the governor’s race: Wendy Davis, a Democratic state senator from Fort Worth who had filibustered an anti-abortion bill on the floor of the legislature for thirteen hours. Democrats from across the country poured money into her campaign, and a team of Obama-aligned operatives set up a group called Battleground Texas to help run it. “The national media wanted the story that Texas was turning purple, that the great red bastion was being broken,” Wayne Hamilton, who managed Abbott’s campaign, told me. Davis was intent on debating Abbott, but he would do so only with strict conditions; their first debate was on a Friday night, in an auditorium without an audience. “They definitely didn’t want any attention on the real issues,” Davis told me. Abbott linked Davis to Obama, and went on to defeat her by twenty points. Matt Angle, the director of the Lone Star Project, a Democratic PAC, told me, “Once you get tagged as a national Democrat or a national liberal, you can’t get from here to there.”
In Abbott’s first six months as governor, he vetoed more than two hundred million dollars’ worth of legislative directives, but his own policy aims were largely undefined. As one former state official told me, “He’s always been an enigma. He often lacks strong opinions, unless forced to develop them by others.” His predecessors, the person said, “had a definitive idea of what they wanted to achieve. Abbott’s often not steering. He looks at currents in the water to see which way his boat is going.”
Lawmakers in Austin had considered Perry “House trained,” Sarah Davis, a former Republican representative from Houston, told me. “His office would call and say he’s not going to sign this bill. With Abbott, you’d get a call after it was vetoed.” Staffers in the governor’s office sometimes referred to Abbott’s review of legislation as his “ruling period.” “What I found interesting is the similarity between being a judge and being a governor,” Abbott later told the Austin American-Statesman. “You have lawyers on each side representing different interests and 99 percent of the time those interests work themselves out and the judge never really has to get involved.”
In Texas, the governor’s powers are somewhat constrained, in part because the lieutenant governor, who is elected independently, presides over the state Senate. When Abbott took office, one of his political rivals, Dan Patrick, became lieutenant governor. Patrick, a Republican ideologue with ties to Rush Limbaugh, was a former radio host who once broadcast his own vasectomy live on air. If Abbott represented Texas’s Republican mainstream, Patrick was an embodiment of the Tea Party wing. Many political insiders regarded Patrick, not Abbott, as the ascendant figure in Austin.
The 2017 legislative session, which began the same month that Trump entered the White House, was dominated by causes championed by Patrick, most notably a fractious bill requiring trans students to use bathrooms that corresponded to the gender they’d been assigned at birth. A year earlier, a similar bill in North Carolina had provoked national boycotts that cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. Abbott kept his distance from the debate in Texas, leaving the speaker of the state House, a moderate Republican named Joe Straus, to fight off the effort. “He will stay out of the conflicts where he doesn’t see a clear gain for himself,” James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project, at the University of Texas, told me. “On the trans-bathroom bill, Abbott let Straus take all the heat.”
Abbott, however, was playing both sides. The chairman of the committee responsible for the bathroom bill got word from the governor’s office that Abbott “didn’t want to see that bill on my desk,” Sarah Davis told me. But when the regular session ended without the bill’s passage, Abbott blamed Straus, called a special session, and added the bill back on to the agenda. Many Republican lawmakers were resigned to Abbott’s public posturing. But forcing them to reconsider legislation that he didn’t want passed felt like a betrayal. “That frayed a lot of feelings,” an Abbott staffer told me.
In the spring of 2017, Abbott signed into law a measure that allowed local law-enforcement officers to check the immigration status of anyone they arrested. Arizona had passed a similar law, but Texas’s version included a component that punished sheriffs and police chiefs who didn’t inquire about immigration status, by fining them or removing them from office. Several months earlier, the Travis County sheriff, Sally Hernandez, had defended Austin’s sanctuary policy, which limited the city’s coöperation with federal immigration enforcement. Abbott called her “Sanctuary Sally” and cut off more than a million dollars in grant money to the county. The new legislation, he said on Fox News, “will put the hammer down on Travis County as well as any sanctuary-city policy in the state of Texas.”
A federal appeals court ultimately froze the provision mandating penalties for local law enforcement. But Abbott had succeeded in putting his stamp on one of the signal fights of the early Trump era. The Governor has long recognized the political utility of the immigration issue. Randall Erben, Abbott’s first legislative director, said, “He would tell us, ‘This is a big deal. I want eight hundred million dollars for border security.’ We’d say, ‘That’s a lot of money,’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, it is, and that’s what we need.’ ” When I asked O’Rourke what it was like to debate Abbott, he told me, “If I raise the issue of poor performance in public schools or the exodus of teachers or the fact that our education lags in the state, he’ll say there are Mexicans coming to kill you. If you point to the failure of the power grid, he’ll point to the border.”
As Abbott prepared for his 2018 reëlection campaign, he and Carney decided to target a region that most other Texas Republicans considered a lost cause: the borderlands, which are heavily Hispanic and historically Democratic. Carney had commissioned a focus group of Latino voters in McAllen, in South Texas, and made two unexpected findings—the voters wanted less gun control and more border security. Many of them were especially hostile to new immigrants. “They’re resentful about them taking up classroom space. They’re resentful about people thinking they’re illegal,” Carney said. “The Democrats ignore the Hispanics. They believe that demography is destiny or whatever.” The key for Abbott and the Republicans was to increase G.O.P. turnout in South Texas, Carney said, and “it’s hard to get turnout when you don’t have local candidates.”
Abbott’s super PAC hired Eric Hollander, a young consultant from South Carolina, to recruit candidates for offices such as justice of the peace and county judge in places along the border where Democrats hadn’t faced Republican challengers in years. “Because Abbott would dominate in 2018, I could tell people that they could win on his coattails,” Hollander said. With money from the PAC, Hollander paid the candidates’ filing fees. His reports went to Carney, who updated the Governor each week. Ultimately, seventeen candidates backed by Abbott’s PAC won their races that year. The effort benefitted Republicans in other ways, too. Early in his travels, Hollander heard from local Party members that Ted Cruz, who was running for reëlection to the U.S. Senate, was falling behind his opponent, Beto O’Rourke. “Abbott saved Ted Cruz,” Angle, the Democratic operative, told me. “Cruz would have lost if it weren’t for the Abbott field operation.”
The recruitment effort, known as Project Red TX, is still operating today. In 2024, it focussed on persuading Democrats who had grown disgruntled during the Biden years. After the election, in which Trump carried almost every South Texas county and local Republicans made inroads throughout the region, I spoke with Wayne Hamilton, who runs Project Red TX. Democrats act like immigration is a “racial thing,” he told me. But “it’s about people who are not supposed to be here taking up resources from Texans. And Texans are the ones who have to pay for it.” As the veteran political reporter Scott Braddock put it, “If anyone should get credit for flipping South Texas, it’s Abbott, not Trump.”
Early one morning in July, 2023, a Venezuelan family of five hid in the brush along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Mexican city of Piedras Negras. Cartel members patrolled the area in search of migrants to extort. On the opposite side of the river, in Eagle Pass, a phalanx of Texas guardsmen stood watch with rifles. Crossing was “a marathon,” a thirty-two-year-old Venezuelan man, whom I’ll call Antonio, told me. He was a student organizer who’d been forced to flee the country with his wife, his sister, a one-year-old nephew, and a seven-year-old stepson. “I came prepared on the issue of political asylum,” he told me. He knew, in other words, that anyone who arrived in the U.S. had a legal right to seek it.
When the family reached the shore, the guardsmen told Antonio that only women and children could enter the country. “I don’t have anywhere to go back to,” he said. His wife began to cry. The soldiers put thick plastic cuffs on his wrists and ankles and led him away. “You’re committing the crime of trespassing,” one of them told him.
Operation Lone Star was devised to counter the legal premise that only the federal government is allowed to make immigration arrests. The governor’s office, prompted by complaints from ranchers like Martín Wall, found a work-around by charging undocumented migrants with the misdemeanor of trespassing. Abbott asked landowners to sign agreements giving agents from the state’s Department of Public Safety permission to make arrests on their properties. Some declined, but most didn’t. Since 2021, according to the D.P.S., the state has arrested more than fifty thousand people as part of the effort.
Antonio was loaded onto a van with six other men and driven to a temporary processing center. “We didn’t think this was going to be that serious,” he said. After a day or two of sleeping on the floor of a large cell, he and the others boarded another bus and were driven two hours southeast to the Briscoe Unit, one of three retrofitted prisons that the state was using to detain people charged under Operation Lone Star. There have been widespread complaints of abysmal conditions at these facilities: rampant mold, rodent and insect infestations, spoiled food. Antonio was most bothered by being treated as a criminal. He told me that he’d never been to jail before, and that it was several days before he was allowed to speak with his wife. After a week, he posted bond and was handed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At that point, he was given a preliminary asylum screening, which he passed. He was released with a future court date. When we spoke, in early February, he was working as a foreman on a roofing job in Utah.
“Much of Operation Lone Star feels like a very expensive form of political theatre,” Amrutha Jindal, the executive director of Lone Star Defenders, told me. Based in Houston, she leads a group of public defenders who coördinate representation for people who are charged under Operation Lone Star and can’t afford lawyers. The organization has helped some seventeen thousand defendants to date. Roughly seventy-five per cent of the cases involve trespassing.
When Abbott first announced the initiative, he said that Texas was being forced to do the job that the federal government had shirked. But, although the state could arrest and charge migrants for trespassing, it eventually had to return them to federal immigration authorities. In effect, Jindal said, Texas was creating an elaborate “detour.” It was paying for thousands of agents to make arrests, for jails and processing centers and the personnel to staff them, and for dozens of judges to hear the trespassing cases. The migrants often ended up where they had started. Many, like Antonio, had credible asylum claims; others were simply released because ICE resources were limited.
At the same time, the state still had to deal with people who were eventually deported. To get out of criminal detention, roughly forty per cent of migrants charged with trespassing under Operation Lone Star pleaded out. About half of them posted bond, which on average was twenty-seven hundred dollars, an unusually steep sum. Even after being deported, defendants were required to attend virtual hearings with a Texas judge; those who failed to appear forfeited their bond. “There are thousands of cases in Kinney and Maverick Counties where the clients are no longer in the country,” Jindal told me. “On Zoom, you see the background behind a defendant, and it’s a ranch in Honduras or Guatemala.”
David Martínez, a warm and voluble lawyer in his sixties, is the attorney for Val Verde County, about an hour north of Eagle Pass. His brother, Joe Frank Martínez, is the sheriff. Both are lifelong Democrats, with moderate politics that have allowed them to survive the steady rightward shift in Del Rio, a border city of about thirty-five thousand people, where the brothers grew up and now live. Shortly after Operation Lone Star was announced, the D.P.S. section chief from Laredo came to town to explain the new policy. David told him, “I don’t ever have a problem prosecuting a case when I’ve got a good case to prosecute.”
Problems emerged a few months later, when he started receiving case files. Footage from the body and dashboard cameras of D.P.S. troopers showed them leading migrants from public to private land, where they could be arrested for trespassing. “A D.P.S. trooper would direct a group of people to walk through that gate right there, or to sit under that tree and to wait until someone comes,” David told me. “I probably ended up dismissing or rejecting close to sixty per cent of the cases.” He dropped other cases because people were languishing in pretrial detention. By law, the county attorney had a month to press charges against someone before it had to release them. David said, “There were way too many occasions where, when I got the file, I would learn that that person had already been sitting in jail for sixty days, ninety days, or one hundred and twenty days.”
At meetings of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, David raised his concerns. “Voices like mine were being drowned out by the louder voices of ‘We’ve got to get behind the Governor, we’ve got to put a stop to this illegal-immigration problem,’ ” he said. A friend with connections to Abbott’s office called David one day to tell him that he was “on the Governor’s radar.” David replied, “He can call me and I’m happy to discuss why I’m making the decisions that I’m making.” The call never came.
Joe Frank, his brother, was on better terms with Abbott. When he expressed misgivings about the county’s limited detention space, Abbott called him personally, on a Saturday, and offered to erect a large processing center in the parking lot of the county jail. People are now detained there before the state buses them to the Briscoe Unit, at virtually no cost to the county. “I appreciate what the Governor did,” Joe Frank told me. Three years later, on the eve of his reëlection bid for sheriff, he received a call from Project Red TX, inviting him to switch parties. When he declined, the group tried to unseat him. He won, but the race was unexpectedly tight. During the campaign, Project Red TX highlighted a photo of him helping to pull a young mother and her child from the Rio Grande. The image neglected to show the full context: he was standing in front of a large group of D.P.S. and Border Patrol agents, who were waiting to take her into custody.
Abbott’s supporters and detractors can all agree on one point central to his political rise: the Biden Administration, by mishandling the situation at the border, created a vacuum for the Governor to exploit. In the summer of 2021, shortly after Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, he held a summit in Del Rio. Owing to smuggling routes and migration patterns, the city historically has been spared the humanitarian emergencies that have flared up elsewhere along the border. But that was changing. In September, 2021, fifteen thousand migrants, most of them from Haiti, got trapped under a bridge between Del Rio and Ciudad Acuña, Mexico. The next year, the Border Patrol released forty-nine thousand people to a city shelter; in 2023, it was fifty-seven thousand.
Close to a thousand people showed up to the summit, including officials, ranchers, and residents from outside the county. Local Democrats and Republicans approached Abbott with different versions of the same plea: to transfer the newly arrived migrants to bigger cities with more resources. When several people suggested sending buses to places like Dallas, Abbott dismissed the idea. “That doesn’t help,” Gardner Pate, then a senior aide to Abbott, told me. “You take them from Del Rio and you send them to Corpus Christi, or you send them to Houston. It’s the same from a Texas point of view.”
Back in Austin, Abbott began holding meetings with top staffers from the Texas Division of Emergency Management. They concluded that it would be better to send migrants not only out of the state but to sanctuary cities. The question was how. “We could not get big enough planes to land on runways in Eagle Pass and Del Rio,” Luis Saenz, Abbott’s chief of staff at the time, told me. Someone suggested chartering smaller planes, but that was too expensive. “Why don’t we send buses?” Abbott said.
The busing strategy, he told his staff, couldn’t be just a “one-time thing.” It needed to withstand federal scrutiny. “Before we put one person on a bus, Abbott and the legal team were looking at us and saying, ‘We can’t be accused of kidnapping,’ ” Saenz told me. “We knew the Biden Administration would prosecute anyone if they could. So that’s when we came up with notices in English, Spanish, and other languages and had people sign them saying that they knew where they were going.”
The federal government can’t hold all the migrants it takes into custody. It usually releases a large share of them to local shelters, many of which are bootstrap operations that rely on donations to provide clothes, food, and other assistance. The lone shelter in Del Rio, the Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, can’t even house migrants overnight. On a cold morning in January, Tiffany Burrow, the head of the shelter, met with me in an unheated room with racks of clothes and shoes. Three years earlier, W. Nim Kidd, the head of the state’s Division of Emergency Management, had visited Val Verde with a proposition for Burrow. The state wanted to bus migrants to Washington. Would she help them do it?
Burrow was skeptical of Kidd’s pitch, but the situation was dire enough that she made a counterproposal. “We can’t have buses running 24/7,” she said. “There has to be a curfew. There has to be coördination and contingency plans for drivers, in case of a flat tire or if a woman goes into labor. And I needed to have someone I could speak with in the receiving city.” It was unsettling that Texas didn’t seem to be making arrangements with state or local authorities farther north, Burrow said, but that was beyond her control. Without some form of intervention, she told me, “this area would have been overrun.”
Kidd offered to let Burrow travel on one of the first buses to Washington. “That trip set the baseline,” Burrow said. “We weren’t aligned on the why. But there was a sense of decency, and it matched the motive of humanitarian aid that we had here.”
Abbott staffers insist that the busing program was as much a policy necessity as it was a political maneuver. But the Governor’s advisers admitted that they’d expected a more dramatic response when the earliest buses arrived in Washington. “No one in D.C. seemed to care,” Carney said. “So we sent them to the Naval Observatory”—where Vice-President Kamala Harris lived—“and it got a little attention.”
According to an analysis by the Times, Texas sent some six thousand migrants to Washington before it bused a single person to New York. But that didn’t mean New York wasn’t feeling a new sort of strain. As the over-all number of arrivals at the border increased, the federal government was forced to release more people in nearby towns and cities. “The nonprofits couldn’t keep up,” Saenz told me. These groups, together with local officials, started sending their own buses to cities outside the state. That, rather than Abbott’s busing program, is what appears to have first led New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, to call out Abbott publicly, in July, 2022. “Adams says, you know, Governor Abbott is a mean bastard or whatever, sending these people up here, using people as political pawns,” Carney recalled. “But we hadn’t fucking sent anybody to New York.” (Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokesperson for Adams, told me, “We asked people who sent you here, and they told us the Texas government.”)
Adams’s statements helped generate headlines and “nationalize” the scheme, a former Abbott aide said. Carney told me that, when Abbott saw the news, “he said, ‘If I’m going to get blamed, then I’m going to get the fucking credit.’ So we asked people, ‘Who wants to go to New York?’ Everyone wanted to go. So we just started up the buses.” Eventually, Abbott would send forty-five thousand people to New York, most of them Venezuelans, along with another thirty-seven thousand people to Chicago, nineteen thousand to Denver, and twelve thousand to Washington.
By the middle of September, Abbott hadn’t just confounded Democrats; he’d inspired Republican copycats. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who was preparing to run for President the following year, spent $1.5 million flying forty-nine migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. DeSantis’s office had paid an operative who recruited migrants in San Antonio, often by misleading them about where they were going. After a county sheriff in Texas filed kidnapping charges, DeSantis’s chief of staff called Abbott’s office to admit that they’d made a mistake. He then asked if Abbott might say that both governors had been working together all along. Abbott declined, but he and his staff kept quiet about the request.
The busing continued for more than two years, but Burrow participated for only eighteen months. She pulled out, she told me, when it became clear that the priorities in Austin had changed. “They got big in the head,” she said. “They said, We’re going to make a command center. We’re going to send buses to every state in the country. We’re going to run them 24/7, and we don’t want to say where the buses were going.” City officials in Del Rio continued the busing, but, by the start of 2024, arrivals started to decrease. The governor’s office “wanted the headlines to explode,” Burrow said. “But, at that moment, the actual number was about to take a dive.”
In December and January, when I travelled along the border, the general atmosphere was sleepy, but evidence of Operation Lone Star was everywhere. The Governor had set up two “forward operating bases” for the Texas National Guard, in Eagle Pass and Del Rio. D.P.S. pickup trucks filled parking lots and roadways. I asked the manager at a La Quinta Inn where I was staying why everything in the hotel seemed so new. The hotel had been built just two years earlier, he told me, to accommodate all the state agents staying in town because of Operation Lone Star.
The flood of agents brought their own problems. In El Paso, a heavily Democratic city in West Texas, local officials have been documenting a rise in high-speed car chases initiated by the D.P.S. in pursuit of alleged human smugglers. There was a six-hundred-and-twenty-five-per-cent increase in such chases between 2022 and 2023, according to the El Paso County attorney’s office. Most of them began in the western end of town, along the border with New Mexico, where D.P.S. troopers were getting tipped off by sympathetic Border Patrol agents. Eighty-five per cent of the incidents started with a routine traffic violation, but about half involved pursuits that reached more than a hundred miles per hour. Residents have complained about chases in their neighborhoods and around schools, hospitals, and places of worship. “It all coincided with Operation Lone Star,” Christina Sanchez, the county attorney, told me.
Just before Christmas, I visited Sanchez at her office downtown, next to the county jail. She and her staff were seeing markedly more accidents as a result of the chases, some of them fatal. One of them, in July, 2023, resulted in a collision with two other cars on the road, sending nine people to the hospital. Another, in October, 2024, led to a crash that killed a forty-four-year-old mother on her way to work. A Human Rights Watch investigation found that, in communities where Operation Lone Star was in effect, vehicle pursuits have caused a hundred and six deaths and more than three hundred injuries. “There are no D.P.S. policy guidelines for how they conduct these chases,” Sanchez told me. “We have the buoys, the concertina wire, we have the troopers. But that increased activity doesn’t necessarily equate to a safer environment for the community.”
The city and county governments in El Paso have clashed with Abbott before. During the pandemic, a local judge challenged an order from the Governor that banned mask mandates and required businesses to reopen. County officials have joined lawsuits against some of the state’s immigration policies. Abbott’s repeated claims that the state was being “invaded” by migrants were especially jarring to city residents. In 2019, a twenty-one-year-old from a small town outside Dallas had travelled to a Walmart in El Paso and opened fire with a semi-automatic assault rifle, killing twenty-three shoppers. In an online post before the attack, the shooter had written about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” and claimed to be “simply defending my country.”
To qualify for state grants under Operation Lone Star, the city and the county had to issue disaster declarations. Sanchez told me that officials initially “held off at the local level because there really was this concern about what we’re saying to our community with language like ‘invasion.’ ” Their hesitation was costly. El Paso gets money from the U.S. government for holding federal inmates in county jails—typically, about thirty-three thousand dollars a day. By law, however, El Paso had to give priority to state detainees, including those arrested under Operation Lone Star. The city declared an emergency in December, 2022, and the county finally followed suit in July, 2024. But the sums that they eventually received from state grants didn’t cover the budget shortfalls.
Late last year, Sergio Coronado, an El Paso County commissioner, met with D.P.S. representatives to communicate his concerns. His constituents, in addition to complaining about the high-speed chases, had reported being racially profiled. One evening in October, 2023, a family of four was driving on the west side of the city when a blue Silverado abruptly stopped in front of their car. According to a statement taken by the county commissioner’s office, a white vehicle then boxed them in from behind. Agents got out and surrounded the car with their guns drawn. They were looking for smugglers and had stopped the wrong vehicle. In 2023, a forty-eight-year-old El Paso resident was taking medicine to her grandmother when she was arrested by state troopers on a stakeout, who had mistaken her for a smuggler. “They heard us out,” Coronado told me of the D.P.S. agents. “But I didn’t get the feeling that they were going to be responsive.”
At one point, Coronado asked the agents why, with the state spending more than eleven billion dollars on Operation Lone Star, the D.P.S. didn’t use helicopters to conduct the chases in a more responsible manner. “Our helicopter is in Lubbock,” he was told. “It needs repairs.”
In the same special session in which Abbott’s voucher proposal was defeated, the legislature passed a sweeping and audacious immigration-enforcement bill. “These measures were deliberately paired,” a senior House aide told me. “The immigration bill kept things more or less in line.”
The measure, known as Senate Bill 4, allows state officials to arrest anyone they suspect of crossing the border illegally and, if they’re undocumented, to deport them. The bill appeared to contradict a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that struck down sections of a similar law in Arizona, on the ground that it preëmpted federal authority over immigration. (Antonin Scalia, in a forceful dissent, wrote, “As a sovereign, Arizona has the inherent power to exclude persons from its territory.”) The Biden Justice Department sued Texas, arguing that the state was usurping the powers of the federal government, and the case went to a federal appeals court. Last March, on the same day that Texas’s solicitor general defended S.B. 4 before the appellate judges, Abbott spoke at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank in Austin. “We found ways to try to craft that law to be consistent with the dissent that was wrote in the Arizona case by Justice Scalia,” he said.
With Trump in the White House, the Justice Department is no longer expected to contest S.B. 4 in court. Lucas Guttentag, a former senior adviser at the Justice Department and a professor at Stanford Law School, told me that the Trump Administration “will abandon the principle that the U.S. fought for and won before the Supreme Court in the Arizona case—namely, that the federal government must have sole authority over the enforcement of immigration laws.”
There are strategic reasons for this reversal. The new Administration’s first set of executive orders made the same argument that Abbott did when he declared a state emergency: the country is in the midst of an “invasion.” But ICE has already struggled to deliver on the deportation numbers that Trump campaigned on. Three top officials at the agency have been demoted as a result. Thomas Homan, the President’s so-called border czar, has said that he is “not happy.” The most obvious way for the federal government to boost arrests is to enlist states in its wider enforcement effort.
Texas will almost certainly be a key partner. The state’s land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, has offered the Administration a fourteen-hundred-acre ranch in Starr County to build a detention facility. “We have thirteen million acres around the state,” she said. “We want them to be able to utilize that.” In January, Homan spent a night at the governor’s mansion before he and Abbott visited members of the Texas National Guard in Eagle Pass. “The cavalry is here,” Abbott told them.
The D.P.S. agents who’d been policing private land were now, on Abbott’s orders, working with the Department of Homeland Security to “track down the thousands of illegal immigrants with active warrants across Texas and deport them from our country.” The Texas National Guard, for its part, has radically broadened its remit. On January 31st, the Trump Administration signed an agreement with Abbott that relied on a previously unused section of the Immigration and Nationality Act called the “mass-influx provision,” which gives state law-enforcement officers the powers of federal immigration agents. According to the agreement, the Texas National Guard can now deport migrants. This will not only “massively increase the government’s resources beyond what’s currently appropriated” by Congress, Guttentag told me. “It unleashes this separate immigrant-detention-and-deportation force at the state level.” Operation Lone Star, he added, “is a preview of the illegality, inhumanity, and sheer cruelty that results.”
In 2021, Abbott’s disaster declaration automatically suspended laws governing how the state spent money on Operation Lone Star. Four years later, those temporary measures have essentially become permanent. The Texas Observerrecently reported that at least $3.5 billion in Operation Lone Star funding has gone to no-bid contracts and emergency procurement orders. Executives at some of the companies benefitting from the state’s largesse have made generous donations to Abbott’s campaign fund. Operation Lone Star, in the meantime, has become a significant part of the Texas economy. Already, the state legislature is proposing another $6.5 billion for border security. A few weeks ago, with migrant-arrival numbers at historic lows, Starr County declared a border disaster. It hadn’t done so at any point in the past four years, but, according to the Texas Tribune, the county wanted money for more prosecutors because a state program had been cut. Its best chance of accessing the funds was applying through Operation Lone Star.
In mid-February, while the Trump Administration was slashing the federal budget and firing thousands of government employees, Abbott travelled to Washington to make a request. In meetings with Trump, and then with House Speaker Mike Johnson, he explained that he wanted Congress to reimburse Texas for the cost of Operation Lone Star, which he called “services rendered.” “This is a payment for real-estate assets and improvements provided by the state,” he said. Carney, Abbott’s political adviser, put it more simply. “It wasn’t a Texas thing as much as an American thing,” he told me. “I think everybody recognizes that Texas went above and beyond.” ♦
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/17/the-unchecked-authority-of-greg-abbott
