Texas Takes Feds' Cash
Budget bill likely to reimburse state for its $11 billion immigration policing initiative
Sharpening his rhetorical attack on the Biden administration’s immigration policies, in March 2021 Texas Governor Greg Abbott promised that Texas would police the border itself. “Texas is stepping up to fill the gaps left open by the federal government to secure the border, apprehend dangerous criminals, and keep Texans safe,” he said in Mission, a border city in the Río Grande Valley. Less than four years later, he asked Congress to pay the cost of Texas stepping up. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act may get a long way there.
Dubbed Operation Lone Star, Texas’s border policing initiative has cost the state more than $11 billion. Almost $1 billion of that total – in two transfers of $480 million and $495 million to the Texas Miliary Department – came from state public health funds freed up after the federal government sent Texas over $8 billion to subsidize its Covid-19 response early in the pandemic. Combining state and federal financial support, Texas deployed thousands of state troopers and National Guard members to its border regions and built a floating fence of buoys and concertina wire.
Three days after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, Abbott asked Congress to cover its costs. “The work that Texas has done through Operation Lone Star has protected and will continue to benefit the entire country,” Abbott wrote in his reimbursement request to congressional leaders. The governor claims that the state has spent $2.95 billion on a border barrier and another $1 million for the floating buoys. The state has run up $3.62 billion in personnel costs to pay the thousands of National Guard soldiers that the state has deployed as part of Operation Lone Star and another $2.25 billion to pay state troopers, the letter claimed. To house National Guard members, the state’s Eagle Forward Operating Base, which cost $116 million to build, costs more than $14 million per month to operate, the governor wrote to congressional leaders.
The state is on track to recoup its costs. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed last week, creates a $10 billion federally funded grant program for state and local governments committed to border policing. The grant program, called the State Border Security Reinforcement Fund, covers expenses since January 20, 2021, the date of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. Though Congress didn’t reference Texas in the law, the provision mirrors language in a proposal sponsored by the state’s two Senators as well as a similar proposal in the House led by Representative Chip Roy.
Most of the eligibility criteria included in the budget bill resemble aspects of Operation Lone Star. Through the new fund, state and local governments can request that the Department of Homeland Security pay for border barriers, including buoys along the nation’s southern border. Only Texas shares a waterway with its Mexican counterparts so presumably only it can request funding for a floating barrier. Arizona temporarily blocked parts of its stretch of the border with stacked shipping containers, only to eventually pay the federal government $2.1 million after the state admitted that it treaded on federal property.
The fund also covers the cost of moving migrants from small towns to other parts of the United States. Texas, and to a lesser extent Florida, bused or flew thousands of migrants to large cities run by Democrats. According to Abbott’s reimbursement request, the state transported 121,507 migrants to other parts of the country. State records obtained by journalists show that the Texas Department of Emergency Management spent more than $221 million on its migrant transportation operation from April 2022 to August 2024. The governor did not include a cost in his request to Congress.
Texas has also led state efforts to arrest and criminally prosecute migrants for violation of state trespassing laws, after which migrants are handed to federal immigration officials. The state has spent at least $77 million on these prosecutions, Governor Abbott told congressional leaders. Rural Kinney County, with a population of less than 3,200 people, reaped at least $1.7 million in bail money that migrants paid to be released from the county jail only to be handed over to immigration officials. The federal funding bill offers to cover these costs without accounting for revenue that the local government brought in by prosecuting migrants.
DHS is expected to begin accepting grant requests in the coming months.
“Elections ultimately matter,” Abbott’s budget adviser, Sarah Hicks, said in 2022, hopeful that the federal government would eventually take over the cost of the state’s immigration policing strategy. It may have taken longer than Texas leaders wished, but it appears that Congress has now responded.