AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — San Antonio and Austin have joined a “summer of resistance” against Texas’ new law that bars sanctuary cities and punishes with jail and stiff fines law enforcement officials who refuse to comply with federal immigration holds.
Senate Bill 4 subjects state and local government officials, including college campus police, to Class A misdemeanor charges, punishable by up to a year in jail and fines of up to $25,000 a day, if they refuse to comply with detainer requests from immigration officers.
A detainer, or immigration hold, is a request from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that local law enforcement refuse to release a prisoner even though there may be no state or local charges pending against him.
SB 4 also allows officers to question the immigration status of any “lawfully detained” person, including people stopped for minor offenses such as jaywalking or running a stop sign.
Elected or appointed officials who endorse or adopt policies that violate SB 4 could be removed from office under the law, which is to take effect Sept. 1.
Officials and activists have pledged a “summer of resistance” to the law, kicking off with a protest at the Capitol on the last day of the legislative session, May 29, which also saw a scuffle on the floor of House, after which a Republican member of the House allegedly threatened to shoot a Democrat.
In San Antonio’s June 1 federal lawsuit against Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the city says the impact of SB 4 would be “devastating” to local governments and universities because it “hijacks” their authority to enact policies to protect and fit the needs of their communities. It calls the monetary, civil, criminal, and ouster penalties imposed by SB 4 “draconian.”
“While purporting to protect the State of Texas from the negative impact of undocumented immigration, SB 4 robs local jurisdictions of their ability to supervise officers and ensure public safety, and coerces law enforcement to dedicate limited resources to a job that is supposed to be performed and funded by the federal government,” San Antonio says in the complaint.
It seeks declaratory judgment that SB 4 violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause, Contracts Clause, the First, Fourth, and 14th Amendments, and Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
SB 4 creates a system that allows individual police officers to exercise their discretion on how to enforce immigration laws, which invites racial profiling, San Antonio says.
“By forbidding municipalities and colleges from creating any limiting guidance … untrained and unsupervised local police officers will disproportionately detain foreign-born and Latino individuals, especially those that do not have a Texas driver’s license,” according to the lawsuit.
Nearly 64 percent of San Antonio’s 1.49 million residents — about 936,000 — are Latino, according to city-data.com. San Antonio is Texas’ second-largest city. Austin, which filed a motion to intervene on behalf of San Antonio on Friday, is the state capital and fourth-largest city. Thirty-four percent of its 913,000 residents — 301,000 — are Latino.
SB 4 also prohibits local governments from limiting police officers from providing enforcement assistance to ICE officers.