One Of The Poorest Cities In America Is About To Pay For An Automated Weapons Factory
A weapons company worth $9.25 billion asked one of the poorest cities in America to pay for its factory. Cameron County said yes.
A company worth $9.25 billion showed up in one of the poorest counties in Texas, said we might build here, and walked out with a $220 million public incentive package.
Then flew to California.
An auction. And Brownsville placed its bid without knowing whether it would win.
Cameron County promised a 95% property tax abatement across four phases of development, lasting up to 20 years, valued at $211 million. A JETI (Jobs, Energy, Technology, and Innovation Act) school district tax agreement from Point Isabel ISD on top of that. And $10 million in cash from the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation, committed for 2026, no strings attached.
A total public incentive package of more than $220 million.
Saronic Technologies’ official response, “Saronic’s nationwide search for a location to build Port Alpha remains active and ongoing.”
Saronic closed a $1.75 billion Series D funding round in March 2026. The company is valued at $9.25 billion. It is a defense technology powerhouse that raised nearly $2 billion in a single funding round four months ago.
Cameron County’s median household income is roughly $52,000. Its poverty rate is among the highest in Texas.
And while Cameron County was voting unanimously to hand $220 million to a $9.25 billion company, Saronic was simultaneously meeting with economic development officials in Solano County, California. Governor Newsom’s office is personally running point on the California bid.
This is not a company agonizing over where to plant roots. Meanwhile, the Brownsville Commissioner’s Court seems willing to bring them to their community, at any cost.
Former Congressional candidate, Etienne Rosas:
What Saronic Technologies actually plans to build.
Before you decide whether the price was worth it, you should know exactly what Brownsville just bid $220 million to attract.
Saronic Technologies builds autonomous surface vessels for the US Navy. Drone warships. AI-guided boats designed for what the company describes as “kinetic and non-kinetic strike roles.” The Pentagon’s official policy on autonomous weapons does not require human control over the use of force. It requires only “appropriate levels of human judgment.” Nobody defined what appropriate means.
What Israel drones are doing in Gaza, with appropriate levels of human judgment:
In December 2025, the Navy awarded Saronic a $392 million production contract for its Corsair autonomous vessel, a 24-foot drone boat capable of carrying roughly 1,000 pounds of payload over 1,000 nautical miles at speeds above 35 knots. The former Navy Secretary celebrated it on social media. “Prototype to production in under 12 months,” he wrote. “This is now the standard.”
What they want to build in Brownsville is called Port Alpha. A $3.2 billion shipyard on 4,387 acres at the Port of Brownsville, described by the company as the largest and most advanced shipyard in the world when complete. Four phases of construction. The first phase doesn’t begin until 2029, if Saronic chooses Brownsville, which, again, it has not done.
The job pitch is 10,000 over ten years. Average wages cited by officials range from $75,500 to $100,000, depending on which official is speaking on any given day. Of those 10,000 jobs, 7,401 fall under production and maintenance. Welders. Electricians. Crane operators. Assembly line workers. 35% must be local hires, which means 65% are not local hires.
And Port Alpha isn’t landing on an empty coastline. The Port of Brownsville is already hosting $36 billion in Rio Grande LNG construction, $6 billion in Texas LNG, America First Refining, Forza Steel, and a Turkish company planning floating data centers. Port officials are publicly advertising $60 billion in active projects.
Brownsville is being asked to add an automated weapons factory to a coastline already drowning in industrial megaprojects, in exchange for a promise that hasn’t been made yet, from a company that is still taking meetings in California.
The tax abatement machine.
If you’ve been reading this series, you already know how this works.
Cameron County approved a 95% property tax abatement across four phases of Port Alpha’s development. Beginning in 2029, which is also when construction is supposed to start, if Saronic chooses Brownsville, which it has not done.
That means for two decades, one of the largest industrial facilities ever built in South Texas will pay almost nothing into the local tax base that is supposed to fund roads, emergency services, and county government. The community absorbs the infrastructure strain. The company keeps 95% of what it would have owed.
On top of that, Point Isabel Independent School District approved a JETI agreement with Saronic. Point Isabel ISD serves the children of one of the poorest communities in America. And its school board voted to reduce the tax burden on a $9.25 billion defense company building AI-guided weapons systems.
Then there’s the $10 million in cash from the Greater Brownsville Economic Development Corporation. Cash, committed for 2026, before Saronic has agreed to anything.
The accountability mechanism for all of this is a sliding scale tied to job creation numbers that won’t be verified for years. If Saronic hits 90% of its job targets, it keeps 85% of its abatement. A percentage of a percentage, measured against projections made by the company seeking the subsidy, verified by the government that approved the subsidy, years after the public money is already gone.
In Carson County, Fermi America got a 100% tax abatement, a 99-year lease on public university land, and a 20-year water agreement with no penalty clause for exceeding usage limits. The CEO was later fired for cause. The stock dropped 70%. No anchor tenant has signed a binding lease. The abatements remain. The water agreement remains. The 99-year lease remains. The community is stuck with all of it regardless of what happens to the company.
Brownsville is being set up for the same dynamic.
This is the machine working exactly as Texas Republicans designed it. Give the money first. Ask the questions never. Call it economic development.
And if it doesn’t work out, the community can figure out the rest on its own.
SpaceX promised this too.
The people who showed up to oppose SpaceX were paying attention.
SpaceX arrived in Brownsville in 2014 with a promise of 300 jobs and a transformation of South Texas. The community was told this was their moment. The kind of opportunity that doesn’t come twice. Say yes, don’t ask too many questions, and watch the Rio Grande Valley become something new.
SpaceX now has roughly 4,000 employees in South Texas, with the headcount expected to reach 8,000 by the end of the year. In raw numbers, that sounds like vindication for everyone who said yes.
But here’s what the press releases left out.
SpaceX has racked up federal environmental violations at Starbase. Explosion debris rained down on wildlife refuges. A federal consent decree was required to keep the launch program moving. Roads through the area are closed for launches with little notice, cutting off communities that were there long before Elon Musk decided South Texas was convenient. The environmental and community impacts of Starbase are still being documented, and the people closest to it have had almost no meaningful recourse.
Rio Grande LNG and Texas LNG are currently under construction at the port. Forty-two billion dollars in combined investment. Years of promises about jobs and economic transformation. And the environmental fights, the community displacement questions, and the long-term impacts on the coastline are ongoing, unresolved, and largely invisible to anyone not living inside them.
Saronic is not SpaceX. The playbook is identical.
Show up in a poor community. Dangle job numbers large enough to make local officials feel like they can’t say no. Ask for public money. Don’t commit to anything binding. Leave the community holding the risk while the company completes its due diligence and meets with California’s governor.
The weapons nobody talked about.
Three public hearings. Two postponements. One unanimous vote. Months of community debate about jobs, tax abatements, environmental impact, and whether Brownsville could trust another corporate promise.
And almost nobody talked about what Saronic actually makes.
Autonomous surface vessels. Drone warships. AI-guided boats designed to operate in what the company describes as kinetic and non-kinetic strike roles. The Corsair can carry weapons payloads. The Marauder is 180 feet long and designed to haul cargo, weapons, or fleets of smaller drones across 2,500 nautical miles. Saronic’s software platform, Echelon, allows a human operator to define mission objectives and then execute them remotely. If the operator loses communication with the vessel, the boat can complete the mission on its own.
Two weeks before the June 16 vote, one of Saronic’s autonomous boats participated in a combat rescue operation near the Strait of Hormuz after Iranian forces shot down a US Army helicopter. The Navy called it a milestone. Saronic called it proof that their thesis is playing out in real time.
It is also proof that these are not theoretical weapons. They are operational. They are being used in active conflict zones right now. And Brownsville is being asked to become the place where the next generation of them gets built.
What are we doing here?
This is not an argument that autonomous defense systems have no legitimate purpose. Reasonable people disagree about that, and that disagreement deserves an honest public conversation. That conversation did not happen in Cameron County. What happened instead was a presentation on job numbers, average wages, and regional economic transformation, a vote, and a press release from the county judge on innovation and excellence.
The thing they don’t tell you about is always the thing that matters most.
Brownsville wasn’t told it was bidding to become an automated weapons factory. It was told it was bidding for jobs.
Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. (D) stood up after the June 16 vote and called it a landmark.
What he didn’t say is who built the stage, who set the rules, and who benefits when the bidding is done.
Texas Republicans built the JETI program that lets school districts absorb the cost of corporate tax abatements while the state launders the expense through the general revenue fund, invisible to the local taxpayers who will feel it.
Texas Republicans built the abatement architecture that allows a $9.25 billion company to pay 5% of its property taxes for twenty years in one of the poorest counties in America and call it a partnership. They stripped local zoning authority from Texas counties, which means communities like Cameron County have almost no tools to set conditions on what gets built inside their borders beyond the incentive package itself. Say yes to everything the company wants, or say yes to it at a slight discount.
Those are the options Texas Republicans built.
And then they told local officials, as they always do, in every county, in every community across this state.
As if that would be the worst thing that happened to Brownsville. 🙄
As if Solano County, California, getting the shipyard would be a catastrophe for the Rio Grande Valley. As if the alternative to handing $220 million to a company that won’t commit is somehow worse than handing $220 million to a company that won’t commit and then losing anyway.
That’s the threat that drives every one of these deals.
The threat works because Texas Republicans designed a system where communities have no leverage, no zoning authority, no meaningful environmental review requirements, and no alternative economic development infrastructure to fall back on. Where the only tool local officials have is the public money they’re willing to give away. Where the competition isn’t between Texas communities and out-of-state alternatives, it’s between Texas communities and each other, racing to the bottom on tax revenue, racing to the top on corporate generosity, while the companies collect the offers and make their decisions on timelines that have nothing to do with the communities waiting on them.
Either way, the machine keeps running. The next company is already in the queue. The next public hearing is already being scheduled somewhere in Texas, in some county that can’t afford to say no, where local officials will be told that this is their moment, their chance, their shot at competing on the biggest stage.
And Texas Republicans will be there to hand out the abatements and cut the ribbons and take the credit.
And the people who actually live there will figure out the rest.
What you can do.
The deal is not done. Saronic has not chosen Brownsville. That means there is still time to demand answers before the community is fully committed.
Contact Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. and ask him directly what happens to the $10 million in EDC funds if Saronic selects California? What is the deadline for Saronic to make a final site decision? What enforceable commitments has Saronic made to Cameron County in writing?
Contact your Texas state legislators and ask why JETI school district tax abatements apply to defense contractors building autonomous weapons systems. Ask them to say out loud what Brownsville is subsidizing.
Ask your representatives what environmental review was completed before Cameron County approved a 95% tax abatement for a 4,387-acre industrial shipyard on the Gulf Coast.
And share this story. Because the people of the Rio Grande Valley deserve to know what their officials agreed to, what they gave away to get it, and what they still don’t know about the company they’re hoping says yes.
This article is part of an ongoing series on data centers, water rights, and corporate power in Texas. Previous pieces:
Abilene Is Paying The Price For Texas’ Billionaire Giveaways
Project Matador: The Biggest Billionaire Giveaway In Texas History
In Reeves County, The Poorest Kids Pay For Microsoft’s AI And Chevron’s Emissions
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Thank you, Michelle!!! Just shared to bsky. How f'd up can they get!!!