Texas Was Trump's Most Loyal Immigration Partner. Under Hinojosa, That Partnership Faces Its First Real Test
Operation Lone Star's budget is up for review, the incoming attorney general is eyeing the state's ICE agreements, and Texas National Guard troops serve under a governor who will soon control them. CNN's account of the pivot — and of the Republican Senate standing in its way.
For years, Texas did not just cooperate with federal immigration enforcement — it helped design it. Gov. Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star bussed migrants to Democratic-led cities, strung buoys in the Rio Grande and made Texas the model other Republican states copied. That era is now ending, CNN reported Monday, and what replaces it is the first governing test of governor-elect Gina Hinojosa's administration.
Hinojosa has called the multibillion-dollar border operation costly and 'political theatre,' voted against funding it as a legislator, and told The New York Times she will review its budget after she is sworn in. Her incoming attorney general, Nathan Johnson, told CNN he will look critically at the handful of 287(g) partnerships state agencies hold with ICE — the agreements that let local officers perform federal immigration functions — and noted that enforcement of the state law compelling sheriffs in all 254 counties to sign such agreements will fall largely to Democrats taking office in January. 'If I were to keep that agreement, it's going to be because ICE opens itself up to a true partnership,' Johnson said. The military dimension runs the same way: Texas National Guard members are among roughly 1,400 troops from 17 states supporting ICE in a status where the federal government pays but governors retain control — meaning Hinojosa could pull Texas troops from the mission.
The counterweights are real, and CNN names them. The state Senate remains in Republican hands, which makes changing the laws underneath the partnership — including the statute that made unauthorized crossing a state crime — an uphill fight. President Trump and his new chief of staff, Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration's enforcement policy, are expected to push for continuing arrests. Asked Thursday about the border under Hinojosa, Trump said, 'If they don't continue my policy, I will.' A Homeland Security official told CNN only that it was 'too soon to tell' how operations in Texas would change.
Houston has already run the preview. On Friday, 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 sparked outrage — a local version of the argument now moving to the state level. 'It's a foundational shift,' said Jason Houser, a former ICE chief of staff under President Biden. 'It's going to guide what we do on border security nationally.' Whether the shift survives contact with a split Legislature is January's question; that it is coming is no longer in doubt.
