Texas has a 1,400-acre plot along the Mexican border and has offered it to Donald Trump for a detention complex. The state’s General Land Office said in a letter to Trump at Mar-a-Lago that the land could host facilities for “processing, detention, and co-ordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”
Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham told Fox News, which first reported the offer, that the site is “essentially farmland, so it’s flat, it’s easy to build on.” She said she was “100% on board with the Trump administration’s pledge to get these criminals out of our country.” The letter adds that the owner of the recently purchased land had refused to let a border wall go up there and “actively blocked law enforcement” from reaching it.
Camps, jails and numbers
What new facilities would look like is unclear. Tom Homan, the incoming “border czar,” has suggested they could be “soft-sided.” Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, who was picked as deputy chief of staff for policy, has said the administration would build vast holding facilities as staging centres for mass deportations. In a late 2023 interview with the New York Times, he said they would likely sit on open land near the Texas border.
The capacity gap is large. A 2024 spending bill signed by President Joe Biden gave ICE $3.4m to house as many as 41,500 people on any given day. Data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University counted 38,863 detainees as of 2 November, just over 12,000 of them in Texas. “If Trump conducts mass deportations, ICE would blow past that number very quickly,” Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America told the BBC.
Trump has said he would seek to deport “probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million” people. The American Immigration Council estimates 13 million people in the U.S. lack permanent legal status, and says removing all of them would cost at least $315 billion. ICE’s current budget is about $8 billion.
Can the military do it?
Trump suggested in a Nov. 18 Truth Social post that he could use the military by declaring a national emergency, and in his inaugural address he said he was declaring one at the southern border. Two law professors who study executive power and immigration enforcement wrote in The Conversation that no single law explicitly bars him from using military assets for deportations. Legality, they said, depends on how the force is used.
The National Guard is the easier route. The president can activate it for a federal mission, and Barack Obama and George W. Bush both sent Guard troops to the southern border. Regular troops arresting and detaining people would be on weaker ground, because the Posse Comitatus Act generally forbids using the federal military to enforce domestic laws. A support role, such as training, advice and loaned equipment, may be allowed under Title 10 of the U.S. Code.
Local police are a separate matter. A 1996 amendment to the Immigration and Nationality Act lets the federal government deputize state and local officers, but agencies cannot be forced to take part. Police in some counties in Maryland and North Carolina have shown willingness. Los Angeles, Boston and South Tucson have said they will not cooperate. The Democratic governors of California, Arizona and New Mexico have said they will not aid mass deportations, and Los Angeles’ city council passed a “sanctuary city” ordinance barring local resources from helping federal immigration authorities.
Economic and legal exposure
More than 20% of construction workers are undocumented, the professors noted, and 40% of crop farmers lack work authorization, according to government estimates. They also pointed to a record of wrongful removals: an investigation by California state Sen. Joseph Dunn found close to 60% of people deported during Depression-era campaigns were American citizens.
The American Civil Liberties Union has promised a fight. “Trump’s threatened actions on immigration run counter to protections in the Constitution and statutes enacted by Congress,” its website says. “And we will make him answer for his lawlessness in the courts.”
Sources
- Trump’s idea to use military to deport over 10 million migrants faces legal, constitutional and practical hurdles
- Texas offers Trump land for migrant 'deportation facilities'
- Trump promised mass deportations. Here’s one way they could quietly happen. – The Texas Tribune
