Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a new billboard campaign on Thursday to warn potential illegal immigrants about the “horrific” reality of human trafficking, violence and danger facing them if they attempt to illegally enter the U.S.

Abbott said the state is placing dozens of billboards with warnings in several languages throughout Mexico and Central America.

“We’re here to expose the truth to immigrants who are thinking about coming here, the truth about the traffickers who assault so many of the women and children along the way,” the governor said. “The message is: Do not risk a dangerous trip just to be arrested and deported.”

Abbott, who recently made another trip to the border with the incoming border czar, Tom Homan, also emphasized that the new Trump administration will “prioritize for deportation illegal immigrants who have been arrested.”

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Billboards will be written in Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Arabic, and will be placed along migrant travel routes.

The governor made his announcement at a ranch on the southern border. He was standing by a burned “rape tree,” where property owners have said migrant women were routinely raped. Abbott said the billboards “tell the horror stories of human trafficking” and “inform potential illegal immigrants about the reality of what will happen to them if they try to enter Texas illegally.”

One billboard written in Spanish depicts a little girl and simply asks: “How much did you pay to have your daughter raped?”

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Another depicts a pregnant woman and says: “Your wife and daughter will pay for their trip with their bodies.”

Abbott criticized governments and private groups who “make it sound like it may be harmless going into the state of Texas,” and said the state is trying to “provide reality facts for immigrants thinking about coming here to save their lives, to save them from sexual assault, save them from being arrested and let them know there are consequences if they take any further steps to come to the state of Texas.”

“This is tough medicine, but we want no more rape trees in Texas,” said Abbott. “Do not make the dangerous trek to Texas.”

The governor went on to lament the historic surge in illegal immigration under the Biden administration, saying: “It’s a deadly situation, a horrific situation, a horror that we fully expect to end beginning in about a month when President Trump takes office and shuts down the border and restores safety and normalcy to the immigration process.”

The influx of migrants into the U.S. in 2024 drove the population to its highest rate of increase in 23 years, as the nation’s population surpassed 340 million, according to a report Thursday from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Between 2023 and 2024, the U.S. population grew by nearly 1%, the highest increase since 2001. In contrast, the 0.2% growth rate in 2021 was a record low at the height of pandemic restrictions on travel into the U.S., the annual population estimates show.

This year, immigration increased by almost 2.8 million people, in part due to a new method of counting that adds people who were admitted for humanitarian reasons.

Net international migration, which the Census Bureau says refers to any change of residence across U.S. borders, was a critical component of the change driving growth in the residential population.

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Net international migration accounted for 84% of the nation’s 3.3 million person increase last year.

The increase reflects a continued trend of rising international migration, with a net increase of 1.7 million in 2022 and 2.3 million in 2023.

“Improved integration of federal data sources on immigration has enhanced our estimates methodology,” Christine Hartley, assistant division chief for Estimates and Projections, said. “With this update, we can better understand how the recent increase in international migration is impacting the country’s overall population growth.”

Last year, births outnumbered deaths in the U.S. by almost 519,000, which was an increase over the historic low of 146,000 in 2021, but still well below the high points of the previous decades.

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A Haitian migrant approved for humanitarian parole cheers as he boards a bus taking migrants into the U.S. at the Senda de Vida shelter Aug. 30, 2022, in Reynosa, Mexico. (Michael Nigro/Getty Images)

The U.S. Census Bureau did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on the report.

Along with immigration statistics, the report showed that the south was the fastest-growing region in the U.S. in 2024, adding 1.8 million people, more residents than all other regions combined.

Texas saw the biggest increase with 562,941 new residents, followed by Florida, which gained 467,347 new residents.

Washington, D.C., had the nation’s fastest growth rate at 2.2%.

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Migrants wait in line to enter a shelter set up by authorities for migrants as migrants wait for an appointment through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, May 23, 2023.  (Christian Torres Chavez/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Some states — Mississippi, Vermont and West Virginia — lost population in 2024, though in small amounts ranging from 127 to 516 people.

Those included in the international migration estimates this year are a group of people who entered the U.S. through the Biden administration’s humanitarian parole, which has been harshly criticized by Republicans.

The Migration Policy Institute based in Washington, D.C., reported last week that over 5.8 million people were admitted under various humanitarian policies from 2021 to 2024.

But capturing the number of new immigrants is a challenging aspect of U.S. population estimates.

The bureau’s annual calculation of how many migrants entered the United States in the 2020s has been much lower than the numbers cited by other federal agencies, such as the Congressional Budget Office. The Census Bureau estimated 1.1 million immigrants had entered the United States in 2023, while the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate was 3.3 million people. 

With the revised method, last year’s immigration figures are now recalculated by the Census Bureau to almost 2.3 million people, or an additional 1.1 million people.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.