Suddenly Texas doesn’t care about building a big, beautiful wall

Texas state lawmakers aren’t exactly shy about their anti-immigration efforts. GOP legislators pushed bill after bill focused on border security during the 2025 legislative session, and Gov. Greg Abbott has never missed an opportunity to beat his chest about the dangers of immigration and how much it costs the state. But when it comes to cutting border funding, it looks like Texas likes to keep that on the down low. 

The Lone Star State had been out and proud about building the wall, tracking the progress via breathless updates on the state’s Facilities Commission website. Abbott continues to insist that border crossings pose such a  serious threat that he renewed his 2021 disaster declaration just last month. So if everything is so scary at the border, why spend less money on security efforts and slash $2.7 billion to keep building the wall?

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

One possibility is that Texas’ plan to build 805 miles of wall was proving to be comically expensive, with state taxpayers on the hook for over $3 billion for about 64 miles of construction thus far. Last year, the Texas Tribune estimated that building all 805 miles would cost $20 billion. It would also take 30 years at the state’s blistering rate of one-half mile per week. 

The wall also kind of sucked, because it’s a patchwork barrier that could only be built where landowners agreed to give the state an easement for a strip of land. Some chunks of construction are therefore miles apart, so this isn’t exactly the Berlin Wall. But at least Texas managed to build 64 miles of wall in the same time it took Donald Trump’s administration to construct only 21 miles of the federal wall. 

There might be a very sound reason for Texas deciding not to spend state taxpayer dollars on its wall, which is that the red state might get a windfall of federal dollars instead. Just a few days before Texas decided to eliminate billions in border construction funding, Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz introduced a bill that would require the federal government to reimburse Texas for $11 billion the state spent during President Joe Biden’s administration. Their argument is that Biden was derelict in his duty to protect Texas and they otherwise wouldn’t have needed to spend that money. That nonsense is now included in the hugely unpopular Big Beautiful Bill. 

It’s hard not to say that this looks like Texas defunded its own wall efforts because the rest of the country is now going to absorb the cost. Federal taxpayers will get to pay the state $11 billion for past state expenditures. Or maybe Texas will sell some of its wall to the federal government—no, really—and federal taxpayers can be on the hook that way. 

Related | Texas Republicans try getting in on the cash grab with pointless border bill

Instead of spending money on the wall, Abbott is planning on shifting that $2.7 billion to state agencies, including the Department of Public Safety and Texas Military Department. Given that Abbott wants to recreate Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown at the state level, this move makes sense. Why spend money on a stupid deterrent wall when you can instead spend money terrorizing immigrants in your state, which is what you’ve wanted to do all along?

It’s also hard not to speculate that there may already be a behind-the-scenes promise from Trump toadies to make sure Texas has a continuous supply of federal border security dollars. The state and the federal government already colluded to get rid of a state law requiring in-state tuition for undocumented residents, with the Department of Justice performatively suing and the state immediately settling by agreeing that the law was unconstitutional. 

For both Texas and the Trump administration, border security is an ever-shifting target. When the wall was the only thing that would stop the alleged migrant invasion, both the state and federal governments threw billions at the wall. Now, Trump has shown that he far prefers to illegally and violently deploy military forces to stop the alleged migrant invasion. By shifting money from construction to increased law enforcement, Texas is just following his lead.