Texas offers Trump administration more land to stage mass deportations

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STARR COUNTY — Texas will continue to offer up more land to the incoming Trump administration to use for mass deportation facilities.

Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham announced Tuesday that her office is identifying property to be ready for the Trump administration when they take office in January.

“We have 13 million acres around the state, and if there’s something that meets the federal government’s needs, we want them to be able to utilize that,” Buckingham told the Tribune.

The new project is called “Jocelyn’s Initiative” after Jocelyn Nungaray, a 12-year-old girl from Houston who police say was killed by two Venezuelan men who were in the country illegally. Jocelyn’s mother and grandmother, Alexis and Jackie, joined Buckingham to announce the initiative during a news conference Tuesday held on the 1,402-acre ranch she offered to Trump last week to build a deportation facility and where the state is currently constructing a border wall.

“Our goal is to ensure that no other parent has to, unfortunately, experience what Alexis has experienced,” Buckingham said.

With a population of approximately 65,934 people, Starr County is about 13 times smaller than neighboring Hidalgo County. Undeveloped land stretches on for miles. Even within the county’s largest city, Rio Grande City — where city officials celebrated the opening of its first Starbucks in 2022 — an open field is only a few blocks away.

Starr County is also unique in the Valley in that it is home to sprawling hills unlike the flatlands that characterize the rest of the region. On one hill overlooking the city, stands a white cross that evokes the iconic Christ the Redeemer statue of Rio de Janeiro.

It’s here where the Texas General Land Office newly acquired the 1,400 acres of property in October. Last week, Buckingham offered it up to the incoming Trump administration as a site for detention centers.

In a letter to Trump, Buckingham said the general land office was "fully prepared" to enter an agreement with the federal government to allow a facility to be built there for the "processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation's history."

Immigration detention facilities are already a familiar presence in the Valley.

A processing center in McAllen, dubbed the Ursula Central Processing Center after the street it is located on, became infamous for its chain-link detention cells and the cold temperatures inside the facility that led to the nickname "la heilera" or "icebox."

The chain-link fencing was removed as part of a renovation from October 2020 to March 2022. During the renovation process, CBP opened a facility in Donna which remains open.

While those facilities were set up to process migrants coming into the U.S., the detention center in Starr County, if built, would be alone in being used to process migrants being deported out of the country.

This is developing. Check back for updates.

Reporting in the Rio Grande Valley is supported in part by the Methodist Healthcare Ministries of South Texas, Inc.

Disclosure: Texas General Land Office has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.