The state of Texas has offered thousands of acres of land to Donald Trump “to construct deportation facilities”.
The Texas land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, wrote in a letter to Trump that her “office is fully prepared to enter into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the US border patrol to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history”.
In October, Buckingham’s office, the Texas general land office (GLO), purchased 355,000 acres of land – equivalent to half the size of Rhode Island. Of this, 1,402 acres has been offered to the federal government.
The land sits on a ranch in Starr county in the Rio Grande Valley on the US-Mexico border.
Terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but Buckingham writes in her letter that the land was purchased from a woman who previously refused to let state officials build a border wall on her property. Now, the state plans to build 1.5 miles of the border wall where they were once denied.
The rest of the 353, 598 acres, collectively known as “Brewster Ranch”, located near Big Bend national park, were purchased in October for roughly $245m from the billionaire and tobacco tycoon Brad Kelley, the state’s largest private landowner. It was one of the most significant public purchases of land in the history of Texas.
Such an offer to Trump comes in the wake of a campaign in which he promised immigration crackdowns. Trump confirmed on Monday that he plans to declare a national emergency and activate the US military to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
The president-elect has also appointed the former Ice director Tom Homan as his border czar, who has vowed to carry out “the biggest deportation this country has ever seen”.
“They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025,” the Heritage Foundation fellow and Project 2025 contributor said before his official appointment.
When questioned about policies in the previous Trump administration that led to family separation in an interview for CBS’s 60 Minutes, Homan said there was a simple solution: “Families can be deported together.”
Buckingham said she was “committed to using every available means at my disposal to gain complete operational security of our border”.
