Texas Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa hasn’t been sworn in yet and she’s already said she wants a review of Operation Lone Star. Her complaint, in her own words: Texas has spent billions of dollars in this state, billions, to detain immigrants and to police for immigrants.
Billions, yes. Spent because the federal government under Joe Biden abdicated its most basic constitutional obligation and made the border wide open. Texas built razor wire, floated buoys, deployed the National Guard, and fought the Justice Department in court for the ‘privilege’ of enforcing laws on the books and Biden refused to apply. Outgoing GOP Gov. Greg Abbott spent that money because the alternative was Texas under seige.
Then the policy changed in Washington, and look what happened. Illegal crossings fell to levels nobody under forty has seen in their adult lifetime. Catch-and-release ended. Remain in Mexico came back. The cartels lost their business model because the product they were selling — guaranteed entry — stopped being deliverable. The Supreme Court has backed the administration repeatedly, including again this week. Deportations of criminal aliens have run at a pace the Biden DHS never attempted, and the sectors that were overwhelmed in 2022 and 2023 now run quiet.
That is what a solved problem looks like. It took four years of state money and two years of federal will, and it worked.
Hinojosa’s position is that the money was wasted. Her incoming attorney general, Nathan Johnson, says he’ll keep the state’s agreements with ICE only if ICE opens itself to what he calls a true partnership — meaning he gets private investigative authority over ICE actions inside Texas. Read that again. The condition for Texas cooperating with federal immigration enforcement is that the state attorney general gets to investigate the federal agents doing it. That is not a partnership. That is a leash with a camera attached.
Incoming Democrat Attorney General Nathan Johnson also says Texas shouldn’t divert vital resources from public safety to score political points, which will be news to the sheriffs in Maverick and Val Verde counties who spent three years on the front line.
Houston gave the preview before the ink dried on the returns. Mayor John Whitmire signed a directive last Friday limiting cooperation between ICE and Houston police during traffic stops. His explanation: elections matter. A Border Patrol agent told the Washington Examiner he fears Texas will now bar law enforcement from working with them the way California does.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, a border-district Democrat poised to chair the DHS Appropriations Committee, fires back at the “Abolish ICE” wing of his own party and rips the Biden administration’s border policies in a blunt warning to Democrats heading into 2028.
Cuellar tells Fox News Digital that most Democrats don’t support defunding ICE, but he says the agency needs “serious rail guards.” He also takes aim at Biden’s asylum approach: “We just can’t open up the border and just say anybody that wants to claim asylum can come to the borders. That policy under Biden administration, I hope that every Democrat running for national office doesn’t do that anymore.”
Meanwhile, Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa, who has sharply criticized Gov. Abbott’s Operation Lone Star as a political “grandstand,” has never called for ending all cooperation with ICE. Cuellar says he hasn’t heard her support defunding the agency.
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California is the model, and everyone involved knows how that story ends. You get detainers ignored, you get criminal aliens released back onto the street, and eventually you get a name in the news — a Laken Riley, a Jocelyn Nungaray, who was twelve years old and murdered in Houston by two men who should never have been in the country.
There are guardrails. Republicans still hold the Texas Senate. A 2025 state law requires sheriffs to comply with ICE agreements, and Johnson has conceded he’ll enforce it against sheriffs who flout it without a valid reason, even though he opposes the law. Even Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat who represents an actual border district and is poised to chair DHS appropriations, told Fox News that most Democrats don’t support defunding ICE and that his party should never again run the Biden asylum policy.
And President Trump has already weighed in. Asked Thursday what happens if Hinojosa won’t enforce his border policy in Texas, he said: “I will.”
The border is secure because Trump and Republicans made it secure. Unfortunately, nothing about that is permanent when Republicans get too angry to vote for the party keeping them safe.
