The Unchecked Authority of Greg Abbott

Lawmakers in Austin had considered Perry “House trained,” Sarah Davis, a former Republican representative from Houston, told me. “His office would call and say he’s not going to sign this bill. With Abbott, you’d get a call after it was vetoed.” Staffers in the governor’s office sometimes referred to Abbott’s review of legislation as his “ruling period.” “What I found interesting is the similarity between being a judge and being a governor,” Abbott later told the Austin American-Statesman. “You have lawyers on each side representing different interests and 99 percent of the time those interests work themselves out and the judge never really has to get involved.”

In Texas, the governor’s powers are somewhat constrained, in part because the lieutenant governor, who is elected independently, presides over the state Senate. When Abbott took office, one of his political rivals, Dan Patrick, became lieutenant governor. Patrick, a Republican ideologue with ties to Rush Limbaugh, was a former radio host who once broadcast his own vasectomy live on air. If Abbott represented Texas’s Republican mainstream, Patrick was an embodiment of the Tea Party wing. Many political insiders regarded Patrick, not Abbott, as the ascendant figure in Austin.

The 2017 legislative session, which began the same month that Trump entered the White House, was dominated by causes championed by Patrick, most notably a fractious bill requiring trans students to use bathrooms that corresponded to the gender they’d been assigned at birth. A year earlier, a similar bill in North Carolina had provoked national boycotts that cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars. Abbott kept his distance from the debate in Texas, leaving the speaker of the state House, a moderate Republican named Joe Straus, to fight off the effort. “He will stay out of the conflicts where he doesn’t see a clear gain for himself,” James Henson, the director of the Texas Politics Project, at the University of Texas, told me. “On the trans-bathroom bill, Abbott let Straus take all the heat.”

Abbott, however, was playing both sides. The chairman of the committee responsible for the bathroom bill got word from the governor’s office that Abbott “didn’t want to see that bill on my desk,” Sarah Davis told me. But when the regular session ended without the bill’s passage, Abbott blamed Straus, called a special session, and added the bill back on to the agenda. Many Republican lawmakers were resigned to Abbott’s public posturing. But forcing them to reconsider legislation that he didn’t want passed felt like a betrayal. “That frayed a lot of feelings,” an Abbott staffer told me.

In the spring of 2017, Abbott signed into law a measure that allowed local law-enforcement officers to check the immigration status of anyone they arrested. Arizona had passed a similar law, but Texas’s version included a component that punished sheriffs and police chiefs who didn’t inquire about immigration status, by fining them or removing them from office. Several months earlier, the Travis County sheriff, Sally Hernandez, had defended Austin’s sanctuary policy, which limited the city’s coöperation with federal immigration enforcement. Abbott called her “Sanctuary Sally” and cut off more than a million dollars in grant money to the county. The new legislation, he said on Fox News, “will put the hammer down on Travis County as well as any sanctuary-city policy in the state of Texas.”

A federal appeals court ultimately froze the provision mandating penalties for local law enforcement. But Abbott had succeeded in putting his stamp on one of the signal fights of the early Trump era. The Governor has long recognized the political utility of the immigration issue. Randall Erben, Abbott’s first legislative director, said, “He would tell us, ‘This is a big deal. I want eight hundred million dollars for border security.’ We’d say, ‘That’s a lot of money,’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, it is, and that’s what we need.’ ” When I asked O’Rourke what it was like to debate Abbott, he told me, “If I raise the issue of poor performance in public schools or the exodus of teachers or the fact that our education lags in the state, he’ll say there are Mexicans coming to kill you. If you point to the failure of the power grid, he’ll point to the border.”

As Abbott prepared for his 2018 reëlection campaign, he and Carney decided to target a region that most other Texas Republicans considered a lost cause: the borderlands, which are heavily Hispanic and historically Democratic. Carney had commissioned a focus group of Latino voters in McAllen, in South Texas, and made two unexpected findings—the voters wanted less gun control and more border security. Many of them were especially hostile to new immigrants. “They’re resentful about them taking up classroom space. They’re resentful about people thinking they’re illegal,” Carney said. “The Democrats ignore the Hispanics. They believe that demography is destiny or whatever.” The key for Abbott and the Republicans was to increase G.O.P. turnout in South Texas, Carney said, and “it’s hard to get turnout when you don’t have local candidates.”

Abbott’s super PAC hired Eric Hollander, a young consultant from South Carolina, to recruit candidates for offices such as justice of the peace and county judge in places along the border where Democrats hadn’t faced Republican challengers in years. “Because Abbott would dominate in 2018, I could tell people that they could win on his coattails,” Hollander said. With money from the PAC, Hollander paid the candidates’ filing fees. His reports went to Carney, who updated the Governor each week. Ultimately, seventeen candidates backed by Abbott’s PAC won their races that year. The effort benefitted Republicans in other ways, too. Early in his travels, Hollander heard from local Party members that Ted Cruz, who was running for reëlection to the U.S. Senate, was falling behind his opponent, Beto O’Rourke. “Abbott saved Ted Cruz,” Angle, the Democratic operative, told me. “Cruz would have lost if it weren’t for the Abbott field operation.”

The recruitment effort, known as Project Red TX, is still operating today. In 2024, it focussed on persuading Democrats who had grown disgruntled during the Biden years. After the election, in which Trump carried almost every South Texas county and local Republicans made inroads throughout the region, I spoke with Wayne Hamilton, who runs Project Red TX. Democrats act like immigration is a “racial thing,” he told me. But “it’s about people who are not supposed to be here taking up resources from Texans. And Texans are the ones who have to pay for it.” As the veteran political reporter Scott Braddock put it, “If anyone should get credit for flipping South Texas, it’s Abbott, not Trump.”

Early one morning in July, 2023, a Venezuelan family of five hid in the brush along the banks of the Rio Grande, in the Mexican city of Piedras Negras. Cartel members patrolled the area in search of migrants to extort. On the opposite side of the river, in Eagle Pass, a phalanx of Texas guardsmen stood watch with rifles. Crossing was “a marathon,” a thirty-two-year-old Venezuelan man, whom I’ll call Antonio, told me. He was a student organizer who’d been forced to flee the country with his wife, his sister, a one-year-old nephew, and a seven-year-old stepson. “I came prepared on the issue of political asylum,” he told me. He knew, in other words, that anyone who arrived in the U.S. had a legal right to seek it.

When the family reached the shore, the guardsmen told Antonio that only women and children could enter the country. “I don’t have anywhere to go back to,” he said. His wife began to cry. The soldiers put thick plastic cuffs on his wrists and ankles and led him away. “You’re committing the crime of trespassing,” one of them told him.

Operation Lone Star was devised to counter the legal premise that only the federal government is allowed to make immigration arrests. The governor’s office, prompted by complaints from ranchers like Martín Wall, found a work-around by charging undocumented migrants with the misdemeanor of trespassing. Abbott asked landowners to sign agreements giving agents from the state’s Department of Public Safety permission to make arrests on their properties. Some declined, but most didn’t. Since 2021, according to the D.P.S., the state has arrested more than fifty thousand people as part of the effort.

Antonio was loaded onto a van with six other men and driven to a temporary processing center. “We didn’t think this was going to be that serious,” he said. After a day or two of sleeping on the floor of a large cell, he and the others boarded another bus and were driven two hours southeast to the Briscoe Unit, one of three retrofitted prisons that the state was using to detain people charged under Operation Lone Star. There have been widespread complaints of abysmal conditions at these facilities: rampant mold, rodent and insect infestations, spoiled food. Antonio was most bothered by being treated as a criminal. He told me that he’d never been to jail before, and that it was several days before he was allowed to speak with his wife. After a week, he posted bond and was handed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. At that point, he was given a preliminary asylum screening, which he passed. He was released with a future court date. When we spoke, in early February, he was working as a foreman on a roofing job in Utah.

“Much of Operation Lone Star feels like a very expensive form of political theatre,” Amrutha Jindal, the executive director of Lone Star Defenders, told me. Based in Houston, she leads a group of public defenders who coördinate representation for people who are charged under Operation Lone Star and can’t afford lawyers. The organization has helped some seventeen thousand defendants to date. Roughly seventy-five per cent of the cases involve trespassing.

When Abbott first announced the initiative, he said that Texas was being forced to do the job that the federal government had shirked. But, although the state could arrest and charge migrants for trespassing, it eventually had to return them to federal immigration authorities. In effect, Jindal said, Texas was creating an elaborate “detour.” It was paying for thousands of agents to make arrests, for jails and processing centers and the personnel to staff them, and for dozens of judges to hear the trespassing cases. The migrants often ended up where they had started. Many, like Antonio, had credible asylum claims; others were simply released because ICE resources were limited.