While 2024 has seen the border crisis continue under President Joe Biden, with President-elect Donald Trump taking office next month, Texans are hoping he will follow through with his promises to shut down the border.
The year began with the Biden administration prompting federal agents to cut state-installed razor wire barricades at Shelby Park, located in Eagle Pass, resulting in a standoff between the Texas National Guard and U.S. Border Patrol.
Though a Supreme Court order ruled that border patrol agents have the authority to destroy the wire fences, Attorney General Ken Paxton refused to surrender the park to the federal government.
The case progressed through the courts until the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in late November that Texas has the right to construct fences in state-occupied Shelby Park.
Though overall numbers of illegal border crossings have steadily declined over this past year, a report by the Center for Immigration Studies suggested that President Joe Biden and Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador struck a deal to slow immigration numbers at the U.S. border in an effort to serve both leaders politically.
Nevertheless, illegal aliens were responsible for rampant crime and property damage throughout Texas in 2024. The Texas Department of Public Safety has been cracking down on high speed chases, violent gang activity, and human smuggling operations.
Several significant events also took place around Starr County, located on the Texas-Mexico border.
Fronton Island, which was once a hotspot for cartel activity, was successfully secured by Texas. The island was announced as state property last year, and following the combined efforts of DPS, the Texas National Guard, and the General Land Office, criminal operations on the plot of land have been stunted.
Furthermore, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered Trump 1,402 acres of land in Starr County for the construction of deportation facilities. Since then, construction of a border wall on state-acquired Starr County land has progressed steadily.
Approximately 4,544 feet of wall were raised between late November and early December.
“As Texas Land Commissioner, it’s my duty to put Texans first. With the construction of this 1.5-mile section of our Texas border wall on newly acquired state land in Starr County — I’m doing just that!” Buckingham told Texas Scorecard at the time.
She also said that “Due to the Biden Administration’s refusal to secure our border, Texans have suffered. I’m using every tool at my disposal at the Texas General Land Office to protect and defend our communities.”
Texans who live on the border have long suggested the fate of Texas’ border security hinged largely on the outcome of the November general election. The decrease of illegal alien activity in Eagle Pass showed that the reported deal between Biden and Mexico to slow crossings until the election was indeed working.
Yet, once Trump won a landslide victory, groups of illegal aliens decided they would have to make a dash to get inside the country as quickly as possible before Trump takes office and shuts the border down, as he promised to do on “day one.”
Texas Scorecard was on-the-ground in Eagle Pass immediately after the election to obtain exclusive footage of these crossings.
Despite promises of federal help to come, Texas lawmakers are continuing to prepare measures to better secure the state. Several pieces of legislation have been filed to revamp Texas’ border security efforts heading into 2025 and the next legislative session.
State Sen. Bob Hall (R-Edgewood) has filed a measure that would create the Texas Division of Homeland Security, an agency that would be specifically responsible for enforcing stringent immigration legislation and intercepting smuggling operations.
Hall told Texas Scorecard that “Texas faces unprecedented challenges at our southern border.”
“Illegal entry, human trafficking, and drug smuggling are not isolated issues confined to border towns; they reverberate across the entire state, impacting public safety, straining local law enforcement, and contributing to the devastating spread of dangerous substances like fentanyl,” he said.
State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R-Brenham) has filed a measure that would mandate employers and other Texas entities to participate in the E-Verify program—a system designed to determine the employment eligibility of workers.
Gov. Greg Abbott and incoming federal Border Czar Tom Homan thanked Texas border defenders in late November.
“This mission that you are on right now is on your homeland,” Abbott said. “What I know from the very top levels of government through the streets of the people in the Rio Grande Valley, up to the Corpus area, to Houston, to Dallas, and across the state, that is how much our fellow Texans appreciate you, your service, and what you’ve done to stand up [in] an unprecedented response to deter, to deny, illegal entry into our country.”
