BROWNSVILLE, Texas (CN) — Escalating his crusade to stop immigrants without papers from entering Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill Monday that will make it a crime to cross the Rio Grande into his state anywhere other than a port of entry.
GOP state lawmakers passed Senate Bill 4 in November along party lines. It will not take effect until early March 2024, but it has already led some immigrants to consider leaving the state.
Flanked by Texas officials at a signing ceremony in front of a section of border wall built by the state, Abbott claimed President Joe Biden’s decision to eliminate four anti-immigration policies of his White House predecessor Donald Trump has led to record-high numbers of Border Patrol apprehensions of immigrants at the southern border.
“Now under President Biden he has eliminated all of those policies and has done nothing to halt illegal immigration,” Abbott asserted, not mentioning that Biden kept in place until May 11 a Covid-related Trump-era policy Biden’s administration used more than 2 million times to quickly expel immigrants without allowing them to apply for asylum.
“All together since Joe Biden has been president, when you count those apprehended and the known got-aways, it adds up to about 8 million people crossing the border illegally,” Abbott said.
“The goal of Senate Bill 4 is to stop the tidal wave of illegal entry into Texas."
The ACLU of Texas is preparing a legal challenge of the bill it says will give state officials the unconstitutional means to deport people without due process.
“It’s a racial-profiling scheme,” said Jennifer Babaie, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center’s director of advocacy and legal services, during a recent press conference.
Babaie and other opponents say Texas is intruding into the federal government’s exclusive realm of immigration enforcement, especially given that pending asylum claims are not a defense against SB 4 prosecutions.
Regardless of whether immigrants entered the U.S. at a port of entry, federal law gives them one year to apply for asylum and critics say SB 4 conflicts with that.
Though the statute designates schools, houses of worship and medical facilities as off-limits for enforcement, it pertains to the whole state, not just areas near Mexico.
It authorizes all local and state peace officers to arrest immigrants on misdemeanor charges if they believe they entered or reentered the state unlawfully.
Only defendants who can show they have been granted asylum or some other lawful status by the federal government or have been enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program are excluded from enforcement.
Those arrested will be taken before magistrate judges for probable cause hearings. In lieu of prosecution, magistrates can sign orders requiring them to return to Mexico. Law enforcement officers will be tasked with transporting them to ports of entry from which they will cross back into Mexico.
If they refuse to comply, or they are repeat offenders who were previously deported following a felony conviction, they can be charged with a felony punishable by a maximum 20 years in prison.
But opponents say magistrate judges and police are not qualified to vet people’s immigration status.
“Even experienced immigration judges and lawyers may need time and an investigation to determine a person’s status,” said Adriana Piñon, legal director of the ACLU of Texas.
Piñon and others contend SB 4 will erode trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement, making many Texans hesitant to call the police and leading them to change their routines to avoid them.
“It will force people to carry documents with them to show they are legal,” stated Aron Thorn, a Texas Civil Rights Project senior staff attorney.
SB 4 is the latest expansion of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star.
Abbott launched the border security initiative in March 2021 and the GOP-majority Legislature has allocated more than $10 billion to it.
Despite the deployment of thousands of Texas National Guard soldiers and state troopers to the border, along with their placement of 110 miles of razor wire, stacked containers and a string of wrecking ball-sized buoys along and in the Rio Grande—which marks the state’s border with Mexico—the operation has had no discernible success deterring immigrants from entering the state.
Operation Lone Star has also notched more than 30,000 arrests of immigrants, most on misdemeanor charges of trespassing on private land.
Abbott, a former Texas Supreme Court justice and Texas attorney general, has said he is willing to defend SB 4 all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. And some observers believe the bill’s authors crafted it to test the high court’s willingness to let states engage in immigration enforcement.
Supreme Court precedent does not favor Texas: In 2012, the court struck part of an Arizona bill making it a misdemeanor for anyone to be in the state without papers proving their lawful immigration status.
The governor, however, indicated on Monday he believes Texas is on solid legal ground. He cited part of the U.S. Constitution that limits what states can do without approval by Congress “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.”
In addition to SB 4, Abbott signed two other related bills Monday.
He said one of them, which will also take effect in early March, will provide $1.54 billion for Operation Lone Star, including for the state’s construction of border walls, to add to the 16 miles of wall it has completed and the 33 miles under construction.
The other, set to go live Feb. 6, will establish a 10-year minimum prison sentence for smuggling paperless immigrants, and a five-year minimum prison sentence for operating an immigrant stash house.
Abbott’s signing of the bills comes as Biden is expressing a willingness in talks with congressional Republicans to heighten standards for obtaining asylum in return for their approval of $60 billion in aid to Ukraine for its war against Russia.
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