Texas Was Washington's Most Loyal Immigration Partner. The Incoming Governor and Attorney General Are About to Test How Much of That Survives
Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has promised a review of Operation Lone Star's budget, her incoming attorney general wants conditions on ICE partnerships — and a Republican Senate, a sheriff-cooperation law and the White House all stand in the way of a clean break.
AUSTIN — No state cooperated with President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement more closely than Texas under Gov. Greg Abbott, and CNN's post-election analysis, read in full by this desk, frames the question the January handover now poses: how much of that partnership survives a Democratic governor, attorney general and state House. “It's a foundational shift,” Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, told CNN. “It's going to guide what we do on border security nationally.”
The incoming officials are signaling review, not yet repeal. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa, who grew up near the border in the Rio Grande Valley, has called Operation Lone Star costly and, in CNN's account, “political theatre,” and has said she will review the operation's budget after she is sworn in; she has not said what replaces it. Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson told CNN he will look critically at the state's 287(g) partnerships with ICE: “If I were to keep that agreement, it's going to be because ICE opens itself up to a true partnership, which gives me private individual investigative authority over actions by ICE committed in my state.” Johnson also holds enforcement discretion over last year's law requiring sheriffs who run jails in all 254 counties to sign cooperation agreements — a law he called unnecessary, while adding that officials flouting it without good reason will still be made to follow it.
The constraints are structural. Republicans held the Texas Senate, 19-12, so statutes — including the state border-crossing crime and the sheriff mandate — cannot be rewritten on a party line. Texas National Guard members serving federal immigration support missions remain under their governor's control, which gives Hinojosa one immediate lever. Houston offered a preview on Friday, when Mayor John Whitmire signed a directive limiting ICE cooperation during traffic stops, in the city where an ICE officer's fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in July drew sustained outrage. President Trump, asked Thursday about the border under Hinojosa, said, “If they don't continue my policy, I will,” and told “60 Minutes” after the election that enforcement “was too tough. I think it might be too tough.”
