In 2024 campaign, Texas will supply Trump with imagery for hardline immigration promises

When Donald Trump declared victory in nearly all of the Super Tuesday states holding Republican presidential primaries, he made clear that once again immigration would be an integral theme in his general election campaign.

And he was quick to invoke the imagery that Gov. Greg Abbott has been generously supplying in his own efforts to secure the southern border.

"We're going to close our borders," Trump said in a speech from a ballroom in his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort that was carried live in prime time by several cable outlets. "We're going to have to deport a lot of people, a lot of bad people. Our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying."

The references to cities "choking" and "dying" likely resonated not only with Trump's supporters but also with people across the country feeling the effects of Abbott's policy of busing or flying migrants from Texas to "sanctuary cities" — Democratic-run cities, such as New York City, Chicago, Denver and Washington, where local resources are being strained and officials are pleading with the federal government to provide aid.

Just as they did in 2016 when Trump launched his first bid for president promising a hard-line approach to unlawful immigration, polls this cycle show that border security is a top motivator for voters, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. Trump's promise to "build a wall" was something of an abstract notion eight years ago, and the optics of his border actions were often dominated by images of family separations and children being detained without their parents inside cage-like, chain-link fencing.

Abbott's $11 billion Operation Lone Star, a Texas border security initiative launched in the weeks after Democratic President Joe Biden began rolling back Trump's initiatives, came with all-new visuals of armed National Guard soldiers and razor wire along the Rio Grande that make Biden's border security and immigration policies look ineffective but also showed the governor taking action more swiftly than Trump had done, Blank said.

"One of the things that's clear is that in some ways Abbott was in a better position to deliver on the rhetoric that Trump was supplying," Blank said. "Ultimately, Trump became president (but) he did not have control over the federal government in the way that I think Abbott has control over Texas state government.

"Abbott not only has all the powers of the executive branch, limited though they are in Texas, but you combine that with a Legislature that is completely pliant to any demand as long as it's attached to immigration or border security."

Luke Twombly, a GOP strategist and a former communications director for the Texas Republican Party, said Trump is well positioned to, in effect, adopt Abbott's visuals and amplify them for his own benefit to a national audience in the expected upcoming rematch between the former president and the incumbent.

More: In Eagle Pass, Greg Abbott and GOP governors strike familiar themes about border unrest

"With the migration crisis being at such a peak, and that the fact that it's Biden's worst issue consistently in the polls, I think it's going to show that a heavy-handed response is what the country wants, and definitely what Trump wants," Twombly said. "So he's thrown out red meat to his people, and I think it's going to work out and get them to the polls."

More: A rematch nobody wanted: But some big differences define Biden vs. Trump in 2024

Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an immigration lawyer in Austin who represented numerous migrants held in detention during the Trump years, worries that Twombly's assessment is correct.

"I'm super concerned," Lincoln-Goldfinch said. "I'm gearing up for another presidency and horrific enforcement measures against immigrants. We're getting a flavor of all of this right now in Texas, certainly with the actions of Abbott and the Senate Bill 4 law (a state law that allows officers to arrest people suspected of illegally crossing into Texas). And so immigrants are very on high alert. They're feeling very anxious. Many people that I've talked to are planning to leave the state of Texas."

Blank, of the Texas Politics Project, said Trump likely benefits from Abbott's border initiative with constituencies outside of the Republican base.

"As much as Democrats will hate this, Greg Abbott deserves a lot of credit for raising the issue of immigration and the border — among Democrats," Blank said. "And not in the sense that you would normally think about — human rights abuses or what have you. But in the sense of otherwise progressive Democratic mayors in otherwise very progressive cities having to practically deal with the regular arrival of thousands of migrants."

Abbott's alliance with Trump on border and immigration matters have heightened speculation that the three-term Texas governor might become the Republican vice presidential nominee. When both men were in the border city of Eagle Pass last week, Trump said Abbott is on the list.

Without slamming and locking the door on the question, Abbott has made clear he wants to remain in Texas and has already announced plans to seek a fourth term in 2026.

Blank said that Trump, who turns 78 in June, might have once seen Abbott as a would-be challenger but that is likely no longer the case. And that could make the governor more valuable in Austin than in Washington, Blank added

"Because Abbott has made so clear his disinterest in challenging Trump or even really being president, I think in him he probably sees an ally, someone who he can work with more effectively than he's likely to be able to work with the Congress," Blank said. "Whatever the (partisan) makeup."

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: 2024 elections: Will Trump use Abbott's border plan to help his run?