There May Be Border Trouble Ahead for Gina Hinojosa

Résumé détaillé

Caravans are moving north on hopes raised by the midterms. The new governor's first border decisions may come with them in sight.

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.

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.

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.

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