Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) believes he showed other governors the way forward if there is ever another border crisis like the one the country experienced during former President Joe Biden‘s administration.
“No doubt about it,” Abbott responded when asked during an interview with the Washington Examiner in mid-January if he set a new standard for what a governor of a border state can legally do in response to an influx of illegal immigrants.
“Immigration has historically been a federal issue,” Abbott said. “This is federal law that the president and his team are in charge of enforcing. And in an unprecedented way, Joe Biden refused to enforce the immigration laws, and then it turned into a public safety issue.”
“As governor of Texas, I cannot have my state and my citizens have their public safety compromised the way that Joe Biden compromised it, and that’s why I jumped in and literally rewrote the rules for what states could do,” Abbott said.
Abbott is the governor of the nation’s second-largest state and its 30 million residents. He is in his 12th year in office in Austin and is seeking a fourth four-year term this November.
Abbott, 68, met with the Washington Examiner in El Paso moments after he was endorsed by the National Border Patrol Council. The endorsement served as a sort of validation for the actions that his administration took against Washington during the Biden administration — even federal agents support the way he navigated the 2021-2024 border crisis.
“One of the main things I’m talking about for my reelection is, we have to have a governor who’s committed to ensuring border security for not just the next four years, but the next 40 years,” Abbott said. “We don’t know who’s going to be president after President [Donald] Trump. What we do know is Texas must be ready, regardless of who the president is.”
Abbott said that while he has already established his legacy, there is still more he wants to get done on the border.
Rewriting the state playbook
Abbott took unprecedented action for an elected state leader as the number of foreigners crossing the southern border illegally began to rise in 2021. “Texas changed the playbook for how a state … can push back and protect its residents when an administration fails to secure the border,” Andrew Arthur, a former immigration judge who is now a resident fellow in law and policy for the Center of Immigration Studies, wrote in an email.
Col. Freeman Martin has led the Texas Department of Public Safety since shortly after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. He said “no state” had done more and that “Texas is the national standard for public safety.”
Col. Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas DPS during the Biden administration, said Abbott “absolutely” changed the game on immigration enforcement.
“He set the standard in terms of what can be done and what should be done, and he was able to work with the state legislature to get the funding,” McCraw said.
During the Biden administration, Abbott effectively used state resources to enforce federal immigration laws that he said Biden was failing to uphold. Unlike Trump’s battles with blue states over immigration enforcement, Abbott’s actions attempted to force the federal government to enforce immigration laws rather than prevent it from doing so.
However, two professors and immigration law experts told the Washington Examiner they thought Abbott went too far, doing things that the nation’s founders never intended.
Fernando Chang-Muy is the Thomas O’Boyle adjunct professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he teaches refugee law and policy. He said Abbott’s actions were out of line with the Constitution, which maintains that states do not have the same powers as the federal government.
“Imagine if all 50 states had their own separate immigration laws, separate coining of money, or that Texas declared war on Mexico,” Chang-Muy said. “If you believe in the Constitution, in the rule of law, in precedent, and in standard practice, then Abbott’s individual state policy is in violation of the U.S. Constitution.”
Democrats are essentially making the opposite argument to defend their refusal to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers deport illegal immigrants in their states. The Trump administration has sued some blue cities and states that act as so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, where local law enforcement refuses to cooperate with federal immigration officers, arguing such policies violate the supremacy clause of the Constitution.
Dr. Nestor Rodriguez, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin who has published several books on U.S. migration from Latin America, sees immigration enforcement as a “function of the federal government, not the states.”
“I am not convinced that Operation Lone Star was appropriate,” Rodriguez wrote in an email. “Also, it was not clear to me how much of the operation was about enforcement and how much was a political program to criticize the Democratic policy of Biden to advance the election of Trump.”
Rodriguez added that he disagrees with the claim that Biden refused to enforce immigration laws because “the whole immigration service (Border Patrol, etc.) continued to work during the Biden administration [and] thousands of migrants were apprehended and deported during his administration.”
The border falls into crisis
At the height of the border crisis, nearly a quarter of a million illegal immigrants crossed the southern border in a month. Now, a year into the Trump administration, apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border are at 55-year lows.
Getting here was a long journey, particularly for Texas, which sits on nearly 1,250 miles of the entire 1,950-mile southern border.
In January 2021, Biden halted hundreds of miles of border wall construction, barred ICE deportation officers from deportations, and stopped requiring asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico, among other actions.
Within weeks, the number of people apprehended crossing illegally between the ports of entry rose, particularly in Texas. Various parts of the Texas border were seriously affected at different points during the Biden administration.
Rolando Salinas, the Democratic mayor of the border city of Eagle Pass, told the Washington Examiner at the time that he had pleaded with the Biden White House for help as roughly 2,000 illegal immigrants were coming over the border in his town daily.
“Nobody has reached out to me or to the city,” Salinas said. “I haven’t heard from anyone.”
In March 2021, Abbott launched Operation Lone Star, a statewide initiative that sent more than 10,000 DPS state troopers and Texas National Guard members to the border to help federal Border Patrol catch smugglers moving immigrants across the river and detain illegal immigrants who slipped past federal agents.
A week after winning his third term in 2022, Abbott declared an “invasion,” the first time in modern history that a state has determined the federal government has failed to protect citizens and the state may defend itself.
“The only state to ever build our own border wall, the only state to not only send thousands of Guard to the border to secure the border, but also we had so many down there,” Abbott said. “We built two military bases on the border to house thousands of National Guard troops, who also have worked to build hundreds of miles of razor border barrier and repel illegal immigrants back into Mexico.”
As of January, more than 536,000 illegal immigrants have been encountered by state authorities, including more than 61,000 arrested on criminal charges.
In addition, the Texas DPS had seized 859 million lethal doses of fentanyl as of Dec. 31, 2025. Both the people and drugs seized were intercepted by state and local authorities, meaning they made it into the country and bypassed Border Patrol but were only stopped because of the state’s action.
Arthur said if Abbott had not used the DPS to go after fentanyl smugglers who made it into the United States, fentanyl deaths among Americans “would have been much higher” than the already record-high figures seen under Biden.
During Biden’s first 15 months in office, Texas launched nine lawsuits against the Biden Justice Department that pertained to immigration and the border.
“Then we put the border buoys into the river to deny illegal entry,” Abbott continued. “And the president liked it so much [that] President Trump is now deploying those buoys on a much more massive scale that will lengthen the border barrier and make Texas far more secure for literally decades to come. I signed a law, the most aggressive law that exists in the country, to ensure that every law enforcement officer in the state of Texas will be able to arrest, detain, and deport illegal immigrants.”
The state held multiple emergency legislative sessions and passed Senate Bill 4, which the Supreme Court upheld, allowing state police to arrest illegal immigrants on federal charges.
Abbott directed state military and police to transport any illegal immigrants they encountered to the closest port of entry to repatriate them to Mexico rather than turn them over to Border Patrol. Governors of more than half a dozen states sent in military and police to help.
Abbott had state troopers inspect all commercial trucks after they crossed through federal customs checkpoints at the Mexico border to prevent human smuggling in vehicles.
The state put up 80 miles of border wall by the end of 2025 and installed just under half a mile worth of buoys in the river along Eagle Pass.
Texas was sued numerous times by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Biden Justice Department, and outside parties throughout Abbott’s border endeavor, as those outside the state tried to stop Abbott from exercising authority in ways they viewed as beyond the power of a state government.
Abbott begins busing
His best-known action, however, was his busing initiative.
“It was about March of 2022 when he came up with that idea,” said McCraw, the director of the Texas DPS during the Biden administration. “Sanctuary cities didn’t understand the issues that Texas was having to deal with, and I think only through busing migrants that wanted to go to their particular cities did, ultimately, they realize that it is a problem.”
Wes Rapaport, a spokesman for the Texas Division of Emergency Management, the agency that oversaw the busing, said the state acted “at the request of local officials whose border communities were being overwhelmed.”
In April 2022, Abbott announced that the state would provide free bus rides to Washington for those who had illegally crossed the southern border into Texas, been arrested, and allowed to remain in the U.S. through immigration court proceedings. Texas later expanded the program to include Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia.
“His decision to bus migrants only to cities run by Democrats was engineered to create chaos and score political points, not to solve problems,” said Ben Johnson, the executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “He didn’t try to fix immigration — he weaponized it. And that made things worse. We need less of that kind of political theater on immigration, not more.”
Eric Adams, the former Democratic mayor of New York, received 45,900 migrants in Manhattan and accused Abbott of using people as political pawns. Adams declared a state of emergency over the influx of people. He then copied Abbott’s playbook and offered free one-way bus tickets to Canada for some immigrants in New York.
In total, Texas transported nearly 120,000 migrants to the six cities far north of the southern border at a cost of $221 million.
“Gov. Abbott’s busing plan changed the game by drawing national attention to his state’s border crisis,” Arthur said. “What had previously been an issue for Brownsville and Del Rio quickly became a crisis for New York. That move brought the border to national attention, despite a media that previously hadn’t been paying attention.”
The border quietens down
Immigrants in Mexico began to bypass the Texas border to instead cross into Arizona and California in the wake of Abbott’s stepped-up enforcement. In 2021, 69% of illegal immigrant arrests across the southern border occurred in Texas, but that share fell to 34% in 2024.
Texas recovered $11 billion in border-related expenses through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) pushed Congress to include the massive reimbursement pot of money.
Abbott also said his focus on the border, and particularly the busing, in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election “altered the arc” of that race.
“After he was elected, Trump called me and thanked me for what I did in the busing program because he said it shined a white-hot spotlight on a very important issue, and suddenly he was able to gain traction on that issue, and that was one pivotal reason why he was elected to be president,” Abbott said.
Trump was so impressed with the state’s response and fight against Washington that he hired Mike Banks, Abbott’s border czar in Texas, to oversee the entire Border Patrol in Washington upon taking office.
Operation Lone Star continues
Since Biden left office, Abbott has continued to expand the state’s blueprint for border security. In February 2025, the state allowed roughly 600 National Guard members to be authorized by Customs and Border Protection to carry out select federal immigration enforcement.
Martin said the DPS continues to make between 80 and 100 criminal arrests along the border weekly, even a year after Trump took office — a sign that the “criminal element” remains.
“While our border is overall more secure today than it has been in years, thanks to collaboration at the state and federal levels, the work of OLS is not yet complete,” Martin said. “Operation Lone Star 2.0 is underway statewide – with DPS personnel working to combat and interdict criminal activity with a nexus to the border.”
Texans are far less likely now to see DPS troopers lined up along the riverbanks, given that the number of people crossing illegally is much more manageable for Border Patrol. But in South and West Texas, troops remain on the roads looking for human smugglers, as well as tracking people on foot traversing the brush.
Abbott’s priorities are preparing for a “post-Trump border” by ensuring the 538 miles of buoy barrier and wall that the federal government is installing will be maintained, that all parts of the border have adequate staffing, such as military or back-up law enforcement support, and fully enforcing S.B. 4.
“There is no way to say what border security needs will look like years from now,” Martin said. “As Mexican drug cartels continue to evolve and adapt to the border security strategies put in place, the department will adjust its operations as needed to prevent, detect, and interdict transnational criminal activity between ports of entry.”
Johnson was concerned that the precedent Abbott set by taking on a federal issue could have broader impacts, even in Minnesota, where Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has maintained that he has to protect his residents from thousands of federal immigration officers who descended in Minneapolis earlier this month.
“If Gov. Abbott asserts a broad new power to battle his political opponents over immigration, then governors in states like California or Minnesota will claim the same power to battle their political opponents over immigration,” Johnson said. “So far, I haven’t heard Gov. Abbott defend Gov. Walz’s right to ‘protect his citizens’ from what he sees as out-of-control or abusive federal enforcement. Where does this all end?”
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Police associations in all of Texas’s major cities have endorsed Abbott for a fourth term, as well as the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas and the Texas Game Warden Association.
The Texas gubernatorial race is rated “solid Republican” by the Cook Political Report. The Republican and Democratic primaries are scheduled for March. Abbott entered the election year with $105 million cash on hand.
Anna Giaritelli is the Washington Examiner‘s homeland security reporter.
