Texas authorities say they are prepared to offer President-elect Donald Trump 1,400-acres (567 hectares) of land along the US-Mexico border to build detention facilities for undocumented migrants.In a letter, the Texas General Land Office said the plot could be used to build facilities for “processing, detention, and co-ordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history”.Trump has repeatedly pledged to deport millions of undocumented migrants and mobilise the National Guard to help carry this out.His plan, however, is likely to face enormous financial and logistics hurdles, as well as immediate legal challenges from rights groups.The letter, published online and sent to Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, notes that the owner of the recently purchased land had refused to allow a border wall to be built there and “actively blocked law enforcement” from accessing it.”Now it’s essentially farmland, so it’s flat, it’s easy to build on. We can very easily put a detention centre on there,” Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said in an interview with Fox News, which first reported the offer.The state government in Texas, which launched its own unilateral border security operation after Trump left office, has been broadly supportive of Trump’s promises to strengthen the US-Mexico border. Buckingham said she was “100% on board with the Trump administration’s pledge to get these criminals out of our country”.But the Democratic governors of three other southern border states – California, Arizona, and New Mexico – have said they will not aid mass deportations.“Local and state officials on the frontlines of the Harris-Biden border invasion have been suffering for four years and are eager for President Trump to return to the Oval Office,” Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.”President Trump will marshal every lever of power to secure the border, protect their communities, and launch the largest mass deportation operation of illegal immigrant criminals in history.” What any new detention facilities would look like is unclear, …
