Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Gabb Schivone on the Border Chronicle on December 3, 2024.
Republican-led states have deployed their police agencies to the border, heeding Texas governor Greg Abbott’s call to arms. With Trump’s mass-deportation plans looming, what role will they play?
In January the Texas Military Department seized the 47-acre Shelby Park, near downtown Eagle Pass, against the city’s wishes. State authorities unfurled coils of razor wire and deployed police and National Guard soldiers. Texas governor Greg Abbott also built a military base near the park, which lines the Rio Grande.
In a letter in mid-November, Texas land commissioner Dawn Buckingham announced that the state would provide a 1,402-acre plot of land for President-Elect Trump’s deportation camps—240 miles south of Eagle Pass in rural Starr County. Buckingham offered additional state-owned land for the incoming administration’s sweeping plans for interior enforcement and deportation operations, or what she called “the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”
Studies have shown, however, that undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens. If Trump deports 11 million people, as he has repeatedly said he intends to do, many of the people targeted will most likely be from mixed-status families with deep ties in their communities, not criminals.
In March 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, an $11 billion initiative funded by Texas taxpayers, to turn the National Guard and state police into immigration-enforcement agencies, and to convert state jails into immigrant-detention facilities. Since then, other Republican-led states have deployed their officers to Texas border communities and amplified racist rhetoric about the “border invasion.”
Now that Texas has pledged land for Trump’s deportation camps, Florida and other Republican-led states could soon do likewise. After all, they have spent the last three years operating as a quasi–border force for Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. If other states join Texas in the mass deportation, this would further test the limits of repurposing state police agencies as immigration enforcers. Courts have repeatedly ruled that immigration enforcement is solely under the jurisdiction of federal agencies.
Despite these rulings, at least 14 Republican-led states have sent personnel to Texas over the last three years to enforce immigration laws. The states includeArkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Mississippi. But no other state has sent more officers than Florida, which, like Texas, has embraced authoritarian-style MAGA politics, even though the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is at odds with Trump, his former opponent in the presidential election.
For the past three years, Florida has deployed a small army of agencies to help Texas militarize the border: armed officers from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission patrol the riverfront at Eagle Pass in flat-bottom airboats. There are also personnel from the Florida National Guard, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Florida Highway Patrol, the Florida Division of Emergency Management—“you name it,” said DeSantis, referring to the dizzying number of agencies his administration has deployed more than 1,200 miles outside state lines.
After Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in 2021, DeSantis sent dozens of Florida state troopers to Texas. Year after year he has renewed and enhanced the commitment. In February, DeSantis boasted that he had sent 2,400 law enforcement officers to Texas, along with 600 “assets” like boats, ATVs, and command buses.
DeSantis even resurrected Florida’s State Guard, defunct since the World War II era. The agency’s new director said the State Guard was being trained as “a professional soldiering organization” to manage the “crisis” on the Texas border. The Florida Legislature increased the State Guard’s budget by more than 1,000 percent—from $10 million to $108 million—to include a small arsenal of five aircraft and boats.
“We’re Working with Texas”
“The impacts of Biden’s border crisis are felt by communities across the nation, and the federal government’s abdication of duty undermines the sovereignty of our country and the rule of law,” DeSantis said in May 2023, in another round of sending Florida troopers to Texas.
But some Floridians have been displeased, from ordinary citizens to a member of the Florida Highway Patrol Advisory Council who highlighted staff shortages as a result of DeSantis’s “massive waste of resources.” In February, Miami Heraldcolumnist Fabiola Santiago, referring to DeSantis, wrote, “He isn’t contributing solutions to the country’s immigration challenges. He’s exacerbating divisions that extend beyond Eagle Pass, a border town far from home—where DeSantis doesn’t belong, and his armed forces aren’t needed.” She added that DeSantis’s continual stoking of right-wing invasion rhetoric was “deeply damaging the country.”
To some Texans, seeing Florida officers in their state is mind boggling and irritating. “Florida Highway Patrol?!” exclaimed an annoyed Samuel Vielma as he read the insignia on the patrol car of the trooper who stopped him one day in South Texas a mile from the border, asking for his ID. “The fuck Florida doing over here?” he asked, puzzled.
“We’re working with Texas,” the trooper said.
After the clip went viral, Vielma later told the Tampa Bay Times that the Florida trooper racially profiled him, adding that they had treated him worse than Border Patrol officers who’ve stopped him.
Florida authorities have been cagey about what the troopers are actually allowed to do in Texas, often referring any questions to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Officially, they “assist” Texas law enforcement with tasks involving immigration (making “contact” or “interacting” with migrants), as well as with enforcing traffic laws and dealing with vehicle accidents.
But what if Florida state police participate in Trump’s deportation plans? Ironically, the troopers work under more regulations than the U.S. Border Patrol. As state police officers, they are certified by the Florida Criminal Justice Standards and Training Commission, one of many boards throughout the country that licenses police officers.
The U.S. Border Patrol has no such certifying agency. Agents are hired at the discretion of the sector and station chiefs, who vary from sector to sector along the border. As in most states, Florida cops (including state troopers) must get recertified regularly. They may also be called before the board (usually referred by individual departments) for disciplinary measures.
Theoretically, if a Florida trooper abused a border crosser in some way, the trooper could be decertified, which means they could no longer practice law enforcement anywhere in the state—and possibly in any other department in the nation.
Even with these disciplinary measures, however, very few police officers are decertified. As noted in a story by this reporter published in The Intercept last fall, only 18 percent of officers involved in high-profile killings since 2014 were stripped of their license. Of those, 37 percent were decertified after the police reforms instituted after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd.
Border Patrol agents, who are ubiquitous in border communities, have much less oversight and face little accountability. In 2023 the Texas Legislature passed a law that nominally gives peace officer status to the U.S. Border Patrol. The only catch is, unlike other police officers, Border Patrol agents are not licensed, so they can’t be stripped of a license by a state board.
Federal officers in the U.S. Border Patrol—who compose at least 15 percent of America’s entire domestic police force—are uncertified. That means that more than 50 years of gradual, important changes in police accountability nationwide are lost on these officers, who are notorious for high levels of corruption and brutality, and who enjoy unique impunity at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Just like patrol officers involved in killings that spurred Black Lives Matter protests, agents of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes Border Patrol, have been involved in at least 316 killings from 2010 to August 2024, according to the Southern Border Communities Coalition. Few, if any, agents have been fired for these deaths.
Border Theater at a Heavy Cost
Florida troopers’ activities in Texas mostly amount to border theater. In February, an investigative news team from Orlando traveled unannounced to Eagle Pass to follow them around. Inside the “secure area” of the gated and guarded Shelby Park, the team counted six parked Florida Highway Patrol vehicles—and spotted at least one bored officer watching a video in his patrol car. The team counted another 14 patrol cars parked at a local hotel, but no undocumented migrants.
At any given time, there are about 76 officers—or 4 percent of Florida’s state highway forces—deployed in South Texas in areas like Del Rio and Eagle Pass.
According to local reporting in Florida based on public records requests, state agencies spent $13.5 million over a 10-month period on Florida deployments to Texas in 2024. They spared no expense: nearly $750,000 on gas and vehicle expenses, about $900,000 on meals and airfare, and almost $80,000 on uniforms and dry cleaning.
Once they’re in Texas living out of hotels, Florida troopers net about $10,000 a month in overtime pay. One trooper logged 503 hours—17 hours a day—earning $26,000 in a month.
When it comes to the U.S.-Mexico border, there appears to be no end in sight, and no expense spared, for state agencies sending their officers to Texas to help create and contribute to the political spectacle of a military-grade lockdown on the border.
The question remains whether Florida law enforcement will participate in Trump’s mass deportation on the Texas-Mexico border. So far, Florida officials, including DeSantis, have stayed quiet about their plans. In June 2023, while running against Trump as a presidential candidate, DeSantis visited Eagle Pass and said he’d authorize deadly force against border smugglers, who would wind up “stone cold dead.”
South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, a Republican, was the first to send troops to the Texas border in 2021, which elevated her national profile among MAGA Republicans. The deployment was underwritten by a Tennessee Republican mega donor. Noem was recently announced as Trump’s nominee for secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. And Stephen Miller, an architect of family separation during the first Trump administration, has been appointed White House deputy chief of staff for policy and advisor on homeland security for the incoming Trump administration. Miller has said they’d send National Guard soldiers to Democratic-led states that do not comply with Trump’s mass deportations. It’s easy to imagine how troops already in Texas for the last three years, from Republican-led states like Florida, could be deployed to places like California or Colorado.
In January, as Abbott seized Shelby Park, Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Pass, stood outside the park’s locked gates to tell residents via live video what was happening. It was nighttime. Behind him shone the bright headlights of military Humvees on the other side of the gates. He spoke above the grinding sound of the idling diesel motors as he described his phone conversations with state authorities notifying him that they were taking “full control” of the park. “This is not something that we wanted. This is not something that we asked for as a city. I want to make that clear,” Salinas said.
When Salinas asked how long this mission would last, he was given a one-word answer: “Indefinitely.”
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