Starr County, Texas, voted predominantly Republican this month — for the first time in 100 years.
Home to some 75,000 residents across about 1,200 square miles, it has a relatively small footprint, in a state where everything is glorified for its bigness.
But it’s been making an outsized impression in national politics. Even after its historic flip from blue to red, a century in the making, it’s continued to garner headlines.
Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham stands in front of a new section of the state-funded border wall at a site offered to the incoming Trump administration for detention centers, near Rio Grande City, Texas, Nov. 26, 2024.
Gabriel V. Cardenas/Reuters
Last week, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered up 1,402 acres of Starr County to facilitate President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans.
In a letter to Trump dated Nov. 19, Buckingham said she’s offering the land, located along the border of Mexico, “to be used to construct deportation facilities.”
She has also proposed alternative uses for it, including as a site for detention centers.
“Now it’s essentially farmland, so it’s flat, it’s easy to build on. We can very easily put a detention center on there — a holding place as we get these criminals out of our country,” Buckingham said in a recent interview with Fox News.
The land, which Buckingham declared property of the state in 2023, adds to another parcel previously owned by the Texas General Land Office, bringing the southern border acreage that it controls in Starr County up to 4,000.
ABC News’ Mireya Villarreal visited Starr County to ask residents what issues and values most influenced them to vote for Republican candidates this year, instead of upholding their century-long blue streak.
“The economy is just driving, I think, everybody crazy,” said Becky Garza, the owner of Texas Cafe in Rio Grande City, the largest city in Starr County.
She explained that she used to complain about buying a box of eggs for $10, and now they’re $20.
“If things don’t get better, I might have to either cut staff, cut hours, or I’m going to start with cutting hours and then from there work it, maybe cut down, maybe cut the menu, you know, to keep the place open, you know, because I don’t want to lose my my customers,” Garza said.
And she doesn’t think she’s the only one who’s making those kinds of hard decisions, she told ABC News.
A U.S. Border Patrol agent discussing the lay of the land along the Rio Grande in Starr County, Texas, as part of the federal call-up to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Sgt. Mark Otte/Texas Military Department via AP
Jaime Escobar, the mayor of neighboring Roma, another city of Starr County, agrees. He suggested that residents are more influenced by the local economy than what’s being said in Washington, D.C.
“We no longer want to be considered just a poor community because we’re rich culturally,” he told ABC News. “We’re proud of our Mexican-American heritage, but we don’t — no longer want to be dependent just on the government.”
But with D.C. being invited into their backyard, it’s bound to bring the topic of migration and deportation to the forefront — even for those who may not have prioritized the issue during the election cycle.
Asked about how people might respond to a detention facility in nearby Starr County, Escobar said, “People don’t want families to be torn apart. That’s the last thing we want.”
“But at the same time,” he added, “we hope that Trump and his administration do the right thing and focus on the criminal element first, and then see how in the meantime, we’ll see how the policies can be implemented in a better way.”
Participants in the annual Christmas Parade on Dec. 1, 2023, in Rio Grande City, Starr County, Texas, where a majority of residents are Mexican American, and the most commonly spoken first language is Spanish.
Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Buckingham, on the other hand, believes that “folks who live down on the border feel really abandoned by those open border policies.”
She told ABC News, “They feel like it’s directly harming their communities, both their safety and their prosperity.”
In the same interview this week with ABC News, Buckingham also said that she would “absolutely” offer up even more of Texas, the way that she did Starr County.
“I have 13 million acres. If any of them can be of help in this process, we’re happy to have that discussion,” Buckingham said.
In an aerial view, the site of ongoing state-sponsored border wall construction where Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham held a news conference, Nov. 26, 2024, in La Casita-Garciasville, Texas.
Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images
Trump has said he would carry out his mass deportation plans — a top campaign promise — by declaring a national emergency and using “military assets” to deport migrants currently living in the U.S. without legal permission.
He backed up his commitment with the choice of several immigration hard-liners to join his administration, including South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for secretary of homeland security and former director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan as “border czar.” Both picks require Senate confirmation.
But with an estimated 11 million people presumed to be living in the U.S. without legal immigration status, the promises have raised questions of both feasibility and cost.
Removing them could cost billions of dollars per year, according to estimates from the American Immigration Council.
And while Republican-friendly areas of Texas might feel compelled to support the effort, other southern border states, like Arizona and California, have already expressed their disinterest.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs told ABC News Live last week that she would not use state police or the National Guard to help with mass deportation.
“We will not be participating in misguided efforts that harm our communities,” she said.