President Donald Trump's budget reconciliation package includes roughly $13 billion to reimburse states for border security spending during Joe Biden's presidency. Gov. Greg Abbott is hoping to secure the lion's share of that funding for Texas.
Abbott is expected to ask the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reimburse Texas some $11 billion. John Diamond, a senior fellow in public finance at Rice University's Baker Institute in Houston, said he'll get most if not all he wants.
"My take is that the provision in the bill was pretty much written for Texas," Diamond said. "There may be some excess that other states can ask for, but I think there’s a good chance that Texas gets a pretty big chunk of that $11 billion."
Diamond said that would be, at least in part, Trump's political reward to Texas’ congressional Republicans for their support of his administration.
"The way the bill is written, where it starts on January 20[, 2021] of Biden’s term, and then goes through January 20 of 2029, I think they’ll probably keep some back so they can kind of reward people throughout the next four years,” Diamond said. “In a sense, it’s kind of a slush fund for the administration to try to get their objectives done in terms of border security."
It’s still not clear what Texas will use the money for if it's fully reimbursed. DHS still has to define the process by which states can apply for the funds.
"At the end of the day," Diamond said, "the Department of Homeland Security will take what’s in the bill and set up the regulations that will kind of define what things will be refundable. I think anything that is seen as a reaction to Biden’s policies on border enforcement will likely be allowed."
For Texas, that could include a wide range of costs associated with Abbott's signature border security initiative, "Operation Lone Star," including the placement of concertina wire and buoys in the Rio Grande to deter potential crossings and the deployment of resources from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas National Guard.
Abbott has claimed these actions were necessary because Biden’s handling of the border had led to a surge in illegal border crossings and a consequent threat to the security of Texans. Research funded by the National Institute of Justice previously showed that people without legal immigration status in Texas are arrested at less than half the rate compared to native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes. That research, however, has been removed from the institute’s website under Trump.
Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute and commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton, said DHS will probably want a detailed accounting from Texas before it reimburses the state.
"What was that money spent for and what were the measures of effectiveness, to the extent that they may have existed, that actually did support federal law enforcement," Meissner said. "There has not been that kind of communication at all between the State of Texas and the federal government."
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