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After her monumental midterm victory, Gina Hinojosa will take the oath as Texas governor at noon on January 19. By then, she may already have some tough decisions to make.
A week after she defeated Greg Abbott, a caravan of up to 2,000 migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua set off north from Tapachula, near Mexico's border with Guatemala.
The migrants at Tapachula said they expected President Donald Trump's immigration policies to weaken after the midterms. "The word is that since Congress has changed, the border has to be open," Narciso Aparicio, 73, told Noticias Telemundo.
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Hinojosa inherits the measures that Abbott implemented for a previous surge, including National Guard deployments, Department of Public Safety troopers and a border disaster proclamation that he renewed or amended at least 69 times. She has called Operation Lone Star, the security initiative that began in 2021 and has cost the state $11 billion, "political theater" and promised to review it.
The caravans are unlikely to walk in one great surge to Texas or any other border state, because Mexico breaks them up. But how it does that may not stop them in their tracks. When immigration agents dissolved two Honduran caravans in Chiapas this fall, they handed out documents allowing migrants to travel through Mexico. One man in the current caravan told EFE his plan is to reach northern Mexico, find work and wait there for U.S. policy to change. Hinojosa's first decisions on Lone Star could be made with that reality waiting across the Rio Grande.
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The Familiar Story
The standard view, particularly among the left, is that the caravans pose no risk to Texas because the U.S. border is shut—and it is. Border Patrol recorded 98,708 apprehensions at the southwest border in fiscal 2026, according to Customs and Border Protection data, against more than 1.8 million a year under President Joe Biden. The Department of Homeland Security says agents have released no one into the country for 17 consecutive months.
"The border remains extremely closed," immigration attorney Kathia Quirós told Telemundo. Migrants who reach it, she said, "will be detained, they will be processed," and "the vast majority will end up with a deportation order." Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has said that deportations will continue. Quirós added that border control rests with the White House, so the upheaval in Congress does not alter it.
On the Texas side, money is central to the argument for scaling back Lone Star, amid the affordability crisis that united Democratic campaigns. "Obviously, a new state governor can't rewrite immigration laws, but Texas can make a difference in terms of the choices they make about how it uses its state resources," Kristin Etter of the Texas Immigration Law Council told The Texas Tribune. The current Legislature approved nearly $3.4 billion for border security, and any money beyond the current budget cycle must be renewed by lawmakers.
Hinojosa has also framed the question as one of cost, not border security, but it’s a difficult tightrope to walk. "Operation Lone Star needs to only exist to make us safer," she said in October. "What has happened is we've spent billions of dollars in this state, billions of dollars to detain immigrants, to police for immigrants. That was not a plan to keep us safe." But she also told CNN in September: "We need secure borders, absolutely."
What’s Really Going On
One of Mexico's methods for stopping caravans moves people north. The two Honduran caravans that reached Chiapas in September and October each walked about 160 miles in three weeks, as far as Arriaga on the Oaxaca state line. There, agents dissolved them by offering documents to transit Mexico in exchange for being driven in official vehicles to Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state capital. Tapachula itself is roughly 1,800 miles from the U.S. border.
Some of those now moving north have a plan for what happens next. Álvaro José Vanegas Estrada, a Nicaraguan farmworker, told EFE he left his wife and two children and set out with $20. "The U.S. government knows that 19 percent of the Latino community does the heavy work, construction and hospitality," he said. "Right now it has seen that work drop off, and I think maybe it will give us the chance to get in." His first goal, he said, is northern Mexico, where he would work and send money home while waiting for U.S. policy to shift. If others sense such a shift, even if it's rhetorical, they may follow.
The timing works against Hinojosa. Under Texas law, a disaster declaration lapses after 30 days unless the governor renews it, which could put her first decision on Abbott's border proclamation within weeks of her inauguration, depending on whether he renews it. Democrats are already inclined to let it go. Attorney General-elect Nathan Johnson previously told Newsweek that "Governor Abbott has abused his emergency powers" and he wants that ability constrained.
Trump has said what he will do if she pulls back. Asked about Texas troops, he said: "I'm sure they'll continue my policy, and if they don't continue my policy, I will."
The border counties that elected Hinojosa swung to Trump in 2024, during the surge, and back to Democrats once it ended. However, Republicans also kept their edge on the immigration issue nationally, even among the midterms losses. Voters preferred the GOP on immigration 44 percent to 41 percent in an NBC News exit poll, even as 57 percent said enforcement had gone too far.
Hinojosa's test for Operation Lone Star—whether it keeps Texans safe—faces other pressures. CBP’s November figures, the first to cover the weeks after the vote, are due before she takes office. If those numbers rise even slightly, or if migrants with transit papers start turning up along the Rio Grande, she will be deciding the future of Abbott’s legacy operation in full view of them, with Trump promising to step in if she pulls back.
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