Call it the iron law of border security funding. Once a Republican starts spending money to “secure the border,” he (usually “he”) will never voluntarily stop spending, the border will never be deemed secure, and migration patterns will continue to shift according to global events beyond his control. Like plunking pebbles into the ocean, he’ll toss taxpayer dollars at international inequality, reaping his reward when GOP primary season comes.
In the 2008-09 biennium (the timeline for Texas budgets), under then-Governor Rick Perry, the State of Texas spent a meager $100 million on border security, a task traditionally in the federal government’s purview. In 2014-15, that figure leapt to half a billion, as the state responded to an influx of asylum-seeking Central American children with a flood of National Guard troops along the border (and as Perry prepped his second presidential run). As Governor Greg Abbott took over, the two-year price tag rose to $800 million. Ostensibly, this spending was meant to spite Obama for his liberal immigration policies; Texas’ governors even futilely demanded the administration reimburse them for doing the feds’ job. But during former President Donald Trump’s wildly anti-immigrant term, the logical time to hand the border burden back to Washington, Texas slightly increased its border security expenditures. Trump, of course, didn’t reimburse Texas either.
Finally, facing primary challenges from his right and high on the unilateral authority he’d snatched under the guise of COVID-19, Abbott put the torch to caution, shoveling more than $4 billion to border security in the current biennium—mostly from the Legislature, with the balance from sketchy executive maneuvers. This deluge of dollars fueled the governor’s Operation Lone Star, a costly and legally dubious deployment en masse of Guard members and state troopers to the border to make misdemeanor arrests, issue tickets, and initiate high-speed car chases. Now, both the state House and Senate budgets proposed for 2024-25 would bankroll border security to the tune of $4.6 billion—and nothing seems likely to stand in the way of it.
