AUSTIN, Texas (CN) — El Paso County and two immigrant advocacy groups sued Texas’ chief law enforcement officer Tuesday seeking an injunction to block enforcement of a new state deportation law.
Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 4 on Monday, claiming it is needed to protect the state from the ramifications of President Joe Biden’s supposed open-border policies.
If not enjoined, Senate Bill 4, when it takes effect March 5, 2024, will make it a state crime for immigrants without papers to enter Texas anywhere except at ports of entry, and will subject those charged with or convicted of crimes to deportation to Mexico.
El Paso County — along with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and American Gateways, two groups that provide pro bono representation for immigrants — sued Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, and Bill Hicks, the county’s district attorney, over the bill in Austin federal court.
McCraw oversees Texas troopers who patrol the state’s highways and have been deployed in large numbers to South Texas for Abbott’s anti-immigration initiative Operation Lone Star.
“S.B. 4 is patently illegal. A state cannot replace Congress’s immigration scheme with its own,” the plaintiffs say in their lawsuit. They are represented by the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project.
SB 4 will authorize state and local police officers throughout Texas to arrest people if they believe they illegally entered the state. It will also give magistrates the authority, in lieu of prosecutions, to sign orders requiring police to take SB 4 arrestees to ports of entry so they can return to Mexico.
Those convicted of illegal entry, a Class B misdemeanor, will be sentenced to up to six months in jail and be ordered to return to Mexico after they serve their time. If they refuse, they can be charged with a felony punishable by a maximum of 20 years in prison.
Abbott no doubt hopes most SB 4 arrestees will have their prosecutions dropped and volunteer to go back to Mexico, so as not to overburden county jails; McCraw estimated in a recent Texas Legislature hearing there could be 72,000 arrests per year under the law.
Mexico is also displeased with the statute. Its President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Tuesday the country's foreign ministry is preparing a legal challenge of its own.
Shortly after Texas GOP state lawmakers approved SB 4 last month, Mexico’s secretary of foreign relations said in a statement that the country “rejects any measure that contemplates the involuntary return of migrants without respect for due process.”
Though Mexico has not said it would do so, there is the potential the country will refuse to accept Texas’ return of immigrants who are not Mexican citizens.
Regarding due process, the plaintiffs note that SB 4 defendants have a federal right to apply for asylum, whether or not they entered at a port of entry, for one year from the date of their arrival to the U.S.
A pending asylum application is not a defense against SB 4 prosecutions. And those wishing to continue pursuing their asylum cases will have no choice but to accept their convictions and serve their sentences in county jails.
Las Americas and American Gateways, which represents people in San Antonio immigration court, say SB 4 will force them to divert their resources away from clients in federal immigration courts, and to develop a new system of tracking and counseling those held in county jails regarding their eligibility for federal immigration relief.
“Las Americas will need to prioritize outreach and assistance to noncitizens arrested under S.B. 4 because the time they spend incarcerated could cause them to lose eligibility for asylum,” the lawsuit states.
El Paso County, which is led by Democrats, says SB 4 undercuts its goal of “fostering inclusion and quality of life for local immigrants and refugees,” and it will interfere with a migrant support services center it opened in October 2022 by possibly exposing people it helps there to prosecution and deportation.
“In one year of operations, the center assisted approximately 56,247 migrants by facilitating self-pay travel needs of asylum seekers who have a sponsor in the U.S. and have the resources to travel to their destination quickly,” the lawsuit states.
On top of that, the county says, SB 4 will stick it with a massive financial burden, since the bill provides no funding for increased jail operation costs.
“El Paso County could see an additional 8,000 arrests per year pursuant to S.B. 4, and the county will have to house those individuals in its jails,” it says in the filing.
“Given that number of anticipated arrests,” it continues, “the county will incur nearly $24 million per year in additional costs to simply house these additional defendants. The county estimates it will need to authorize and spend a further $162 million to build additional jail and bed space."
The plaintiffs argue SB 4 violates the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution because Congress has granted the federal government exclusive power over immigration. They seek a declaration it is “unlawful in its entirety” and an order stopping its enforcement.
ACLU groups in Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Arkansas are also speaking out against the bill.
They issued an advisory Tuesday warning people who have plans to travel to Texas next March, when SB 4 is set to go on the books, or later, to “know their rights and take significant precautions to protect themselves and their loved ones because of extremist laws Texas lawmakers have passed targeting immigrants and people of color.”
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