Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced that he directed the Texas Military Department to deploy the Texas Tactical Border Force to the Rio Grande Valley to work alongside the U.S. Border Patrol.
“Departing from military bases in Fort Worth and Houston this morning, the Texas Tactical Border Force will surge over 400 additional soldiers, as well as C-130s and Chinook helicopters, to join thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers already deployed on the border to collaborate with U.S. Border Patrol agents on the border,” a press release on the matter says.
Abbott said in a statement that the state of Texas has a “partner in the White House we can work with to secure the Texas-Mexico border.”
“To support that mission, today, I deployed the Texas Tactical Border Force, comprised of hundreds of troops, to work side-by-side with U.S. Border Patrol agents to stop illegal immigrants from entering our country and to enforce immigration laws. For the past four years, Texas held the line against the Biden Administration’s border crisis and their refusal to protect Americans,” he said. “Finally, we have a federal government working to end this crisis. I thank President Donald Trump for his decisive leadership on the southern border and look forward to working with him and his Administration to secure the border and make America safe again.”
Since the Texas Tactical Border Force launched in 2023, it has apprehended “more than 530,800 illegal immigrants, arrested over 50,300 criminals, and seized more than 622 million lethal doses of fentanyl,” the release says.
Last week, Abbott urged Congress to reimburse the state for more than $11.1 billion spent on border security under the Biden administration. The governor stated that Texas taxpayers bore the cost of securing the border due to the previous administration’s failure to enforce federal immigration laws.
