Texas Volunteers As Site Of Trump's First Deportation Concentration Camp
So that's a surprise!
Texas, the state we suspect may have been named Most Likely To Embrace Fascism in its high school yearbook, has made a lovely goodwill gesture to Donald Trump, generously offering him a 1,400-acre parcel of land in Starr County where he can build a concentration camp for undocumented immigrants and other people he might want to deport.
In a letter sent Tuesday by the Texas General Land Office, State Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham goes out of her way to impress upon Trump that she and the state government hate immigrants as much as Trump does. Buckingham promised that her agency is “fully prepared to enter into agreement” with Homeland Security, Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, or the Border Patrol — any badass deportation cowboys, really! — to let the appropriate agency build a facility “for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”
After all, violent criminals are the only people who’ll be deported by Trump, as long as you remember that anyone in the USA without papers — and probably a lot of them who have papers, too — is by definition a “violent criminal.” As the Texas Tribune makes clear, that’s just how Buckingham sees reality.
In a Fox News interview that also aired Tuesday, Buckingham explained that she’s “100 percent on board with the Trump administration's pledge to get these criminals out of our country.” She said the land offer originated in a “brainstorming” session with her team.
“We figured, hey, the Trump administration probably needs some deportation facilities because we've got a lot of these violent criminals that we need to round up and get the heck out of our country,” Buckingham said.
You want to get violent criminals out of our country, or just to say “get violent criminals out of our country” a lot, Dawn Buckingham is your violent criminal getter-outer.
Now don’t you pester Ms. Buckingham with the consistent Justice Department data confirming that undocumented migrants are way less crimey than American-born Americans.
And for heaven’s sake, you certainly shouldn’t confront her with that inconvenient October 2024 Cato Institute report showing that WELL ACTUALLY during his four years in office, Donald Trump released twice as many convicted criminal noncitizens into the US as did Joe Biden — who you’ll remember Trump screamed did just that! In fact, that wasn’t just a statistical quirk; it was the result of a deliberate policy choice: Trump rescinded an Obama executive order directing ICE to concentrate on arresting and deporting noncitizens who had committed serious crimes. As a result, since ICE didn’t have to focus on crimers, who are often harder to track down, it was freed to go after easier targets ranging “from pizza delivery drivers to domestic-violence victims to spouses of U.S. citizens with no criminal records.”
And since they were no longer a deportation priority, the Cato study found,
Immigrants with serious criminal records were frequently released into the country instead of being detained for deportation. This included individuals who were transferred to the custody of ICE after serving their sentences and those who were previously deported and encountered ICE after crossing into the country again.
All told, Trump’s DHS released about twice as many criminal aliens into the US every month as the agency did under Biden, who put the Obama policy back in place. But again, that will never convince Trumpers like Commissar Commissioner Buckingham, because Donald Trump tough, Joe Biden weak.
To emphasize the myth of universal criminality among migrants, Buckingham’s letter explains that Trump could actually redeem the land itself it if he uses it for deporting violent criminal abuelas and their entire violent criminal families, including the violent criminal children who can’t possibly be citizens because Trump will declare the 14th Amendment void on Day One. You see, Mister President, Buckingham wrote with tears in her eyes, the land itself carried a stain because the previous property owner
had refused to allow the wall to be built and actively blocked law enforcement from accessing the property. Her actions enabled cartel members and violent criminals to sexually abuse migrant women and children on this land for some time.
We looked for any evidence that the land had been the site of any such crimes, but the only thing we found was a Fox News piece about the state’s acquisition of the land in which Buckingham herself made more detailed claims, but without reference to any specific cases.
Buckingham said there has been “a massive amount of human traffic” on the property. Her office said the acquisition includes trees that have served as “rape trees,” where migrants would display women's clothing as trophies after abuse.
She wouldn’t possibly be making that “rape trees” shit up out of the far more mundane fact that border crossing sites are frequently strewn with discarded clothing, would she? It’s true that migrants are often victims of sexual violence, but the “rape tree” thing is a longtime fixture of border panic myths, with no basis in reality, according to law enforcement experts. Those denials just make online dipshits insist that the myth has to be true, and worse, law enforcement is covering it up. Like massive voter fraud, you know.
One more aside: We remember how the very imaginative border grifter Lewis Arthur convinced lots of wingnuts to send him gift cards after he insisted an abandoned homeless encampment near Tucson was obviously a “sex trafficking camp” (police said no, he was lying) — also complete with “rape trees,” because that’s what he said they were.
Commissioner Buckingham is just doing her part to propagate a cherished rightwing lie about undocumented migrants, violent criminals, all. We’re sure that if a deportation concentration camp is built on the parcel, Donald Trump himself will share the story of the rape trees when he speaks at its dedication.
In related news, to celebrate the return of Trump to power, and probably to burnish his 2028 chances, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott yesterday bragged that the state had added new migrant-drowning buoys to those already in the Rio Grande, confident that the Biden Administration’s lawsuit to have them removed as a violation of federal law will just go away in January.
It’s gong to be a very long four years, folks.
[Texas Tribune / Letter from Texas General Land Office]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you prefer to make a one-time donation, this button is definitely not a violent criminal.
Okay, so white slaveowners regularly raped their slaves while accusing Black men of seeking to rape white women. White men raped Native women while attempting to scare white women with the supposed danger of rape by Native men. I doubt any of you would be surprised if women migrants at the border faced the danger of rape by the same local white men who act like the migrant men are targeting white women. Projection all the way down.
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn died in 2008. If he were alive today, he would be working on his next novel, and it would be about America.