Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said she is offering a 1,400-acre ranch on the Texas-Mexico border that she intends to lease to the Trump administration for its mass deportation program.
Buckingham joined New Nation's Blake Berman on Tuesday's “The Hill” to say that once the Trump campaign “understands what they want to do, what their strategic plan is,” the state would lease the land to the federal government. He said he was looking forward to it.
“What we anticipate is that it will be a land lease. That's how we raise money for Texas schoolchildren,” she said, adding that Texas and Trump will He added that he was confident “we can reach a great agreement.”
Buckingham previously said in a November letter to President-elect Donald Trump that his office would allow him to build a deportation facility on a recently purchased ranch along the Texas-Mexico border near the city of Rio Grande. He said he was prepared to do so.
She said the Land Commission purchased the land because the previous landowner refused to allow law enforcement activity or build a border wall on the ranch.
She said she is now ready to work with the incoming Trump administration, including the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol. Those include South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R), whom President Trump nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security, and Tom Homan, who Trump nominated to head Border Patrol.
“We'll just look at what they want the chain of command to be, and once they have a strategic plan, we'll figure it out and we'll get it done,” she said.
After purchasing the land in October, she expects the 1.5-mile border wall to be completed “in about a week next time.”
“We want our sons and daughters to be safe, and they may need our help, so we're happy to work with them,” Buckingham said Tuesday.
Mr Buckingham was asked where the idea to buy and rent land came from, as the committee does not normally deal with immigration issues.
“We all want them deported. We want our sons and daughters to be safe and they may need our help, so we We are pleased to be able to collaborate,” she said. “And once we took that first step and found out they were interested, we realized there were a lot of other properties that could be helpful.”
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