On the Border, Texas Shows Trump the Way

The incoming Trump administration’s new border czar said that Texas provided a “model” for border enforcement. State officials have offered to be a staging ground for mass deportations.

Tom Homan, an immigration hard-liner selected by President-elect Donald J. Trump to be his “border czar,” squeezed into a helicopter last week, as Gov. Greg Abbott gave an aerial tour of all that Texas had done to stop people from crossing illegally from Mexico.

There is a newly built camp for the Texas National Guard, whose border mission has looked a lot like a military deployment. Nearby, a line of buoy barriers in the Rio Grande puts migrants at risk of drowning. The river’s edge bristles with concertina wire that has often left bordercrossers with cuts and gashes. State police officers regularly patrol the brush, arresting migrants in an unusual extension of state authority into immigration matters.

“This is a model we can take across the country,” Mr. Homan said, addressing a group of National Guard members and Texas state troopers involved in border enforcement in the border city of Eagle Pass. “I am impressed by what I’ve seen today.”

Complaining that the Biden administration has failed to secure the border, Texas has spent billions of dollars over the past three years to prevent unauthorized border crossings on its own, often clashing with the federal government while pushing the legal limits of state power.

Now those fights are all but over, and the state is poised to take what could be a central role in what the incoming Trump administration has promised will be a swift crackdown on the border and the largest deportation program in memory.