Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state Military Department today to deploy the Texas Tactical Border Force to the Rio Grande Valley to coordinate with the U.S. Border Patrol.
Departing from military bases in Fort Worth and Houston this morning, the force will surge more than 400 additional soldiers, as well as C-130s and Chinook helicopters, to join thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers already deployed on the border.
“Texas has a partner in the White House we can work with to secure the Texas-Mexico border,” Abbott said in a statement. “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.”
The Texas Tactical Border Force, launched in 2023, falls under the governor’s Operation Lone Star, a multibillion-dollar effort to revamp border security in Texas. According to the release, the operation has deployed thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers and Texas Department of Public Safety troopers to the border, apprehended more than 530,000 illegal immigrants, arrested more than 50,000 criminals, and seized more than 622 million lethal doses of fentanyl — “enough to kill every man, woman, and child in the United States, Mexico, and Canada,” it said.
Abbott sent letters to congressional leaders last week asking for more than $11 billion in reimbursement for the state’s Border Patrol efforts, claiming the price tag was warranted due to “President Biden’s refusal to do its job for the last four years.”
“For the past four years, Texas held the line against the Biden Administration’s border crisis and their refusal to protect Americans. Finally, we have a federal government working to end this crisis,” Abbott said today.
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