Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said on Friday that the state would begin building a forward operating base in the border city of Eagle Pass for up to 2,300 soldiers, creating the most significant military infrastructure yet to support the state’s efforts to limit the number of people crossing illegally from Mexico.
While Texas has been deploying National Guard troops and state police officers up and down the state’s border since 2021, the move to create an 80-acre base camp cements a large law enforcement infrastructure in the region and signals Texas’ commitment to a security role that previously belonged almost exclusively to the federal government.
“This will increase the ability for a larger number of Texas military department personnel in Eagle Pass to operate more effectively and more efficiently,” Mr. Abbott said in his announcement, as he was flanked by a row of armed National Guard members. The camp, Mr. Abbott added, “will amass a large army in a very strategic area.”
Mr. Abbott did not say on Friday how much money the state was spending to build the base, but added that the financial impact would be “minimal” in view of the state’s existing expenditures to house those deployed on the border.
The camp, which will include a 700-seat dining facility, a gym, a laundry and medical services, will save on hotel costs for the existing deployment. And it will presumably make way for additional states that are sending troops to help patrol the border as part of a widening rift between Republican governors and the federal government over border enforcement.
Mr. Abbott has been testing the legal limits of what states can do to enforce immigration law. Several of his Republican cohorts, including the governors of Florida and Georgia, have sent their own National Guard troops to help patrol the border in Texas, where record numbers of migrants have been crossing without authorization in recent years.
The Republican governors of 25 states signed a statement in January vowing to stand alongside Texas in its confrontation with the federal government, which they say has not been doing enough to enforce existing laws.
Over the past two years, the Abbott administration has been engaged in a multifaceted crackdown at the border known as Operation Lone Star. The multibillion-dollar initiative includes the arrest of migrants who touch private property, the deployment of state police and the National Guard, and the use of helicopters and other military-style equipment.
Texas has also been busing thousands of migrants out of the state, overwhelming cities like New York, Denver and Chicago whose leaders have decried the arrival of thousands of unauthorized migrants without work permits and places to stay.
Texas has also added a number of physical barriers along the border, including a string of large orange buoys and concertina wire along the Rio Grande. Mr. Abbott said on Friday that more would be added.
The state is defending many of these initiatives in court on several fronts.
A federal judge in Austin heard three hours of arguments on Thursday over whether to halt the implementation of a new law, set to go into effect on March 5, that would allow state and local police officers to directly arrest unauthorized migrants as a prelude to removing them from the country.
The Biden administration contends that the law conflicts with federal law and violates the U.S. Constitution, which gives the federal government authority over immigration matters. The state countered that their law mirrored federal law in most respects but represented a necessary further deterrent to unauthorized migration.
The federal government is also challenging the state’s placement of a 1,000-foot barrier in the middle of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass. Lawyers for the federal government said that the large orange buoys violated a federal law over navigable rivers. Late last year, a federal appeals court sided with the Biden administration, ordering Texas to remove the barrier from the river while the case moved forward. A larger panel of judges then reversed the order.
A separate case making its way through the court system involves U.S. Border Patrol agents’ ability to cut or remove concertina wire installed by the Texas authorities on the banks of the Rio Grande. The federal government has argued that Border Patrol agents need to cut wire to assist migrants who may find themselves in peril trying to cross the river.
The Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed a lawsuit last year claiming that the agents had destroyed state property by removing portions of the wire.
That legal fight reached the Supreme Court last month, where the justices, without giving their reasons, ruled that border agents were permitted to cut or remove the wire as needed while the case was being litigated at the lower court.
Mr. Abbott’s announcement on Friday on a new base camp comes as the number of migrants entering Texas from Mexico has dropped by 50 percent in the past month. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it had encountered migrants between ports of entry 124,220 times in January, down from more than 249,000 the previous month.
In Eagle Pass, a city that has become the epicenter of the immigration enforcement wars between the state and federal governments, the numbers have plummeted from 6,000 in a single day to a handful a day.
But Mr. Abbott said on Friday that he expected the number of crossings to rise again this spring.
The guards at the base are “going to have the ability to more quickly be able to construct that razor wire barrier,” he said, part of the state’s efforts to send migrants a message that “the wrong place to go is the state of Texas.”
