The Texas legislature this week approved some of the toughest anti-immigrant laws in the United States. The Republican majority in the state legislature approved a series of standards that criminalise people crossing the border from Mexico. These make it a crime to enter Texas illegally and allow state authorities to deport them, the legality of which has been questioned by some experts and human rights organisations. These laws are awaiting approval by the governor of the state, Greg Abbott, a politician who has explored radical methods to combat the arrival of immigrants, including sending buses of immigrants to Democratic cities or installing buoys and barbed wire in the Rio Grande. The politician has already indicated that he will sign the initiatives into law.
House Bill (HB) 4 caused days of tension in the legislature. The House passed it at the end of October, on a Thursday at 4 a.m. The Republican majority prevailed over attempts by Democratic politicians to derail the proposal by Representative David Spiller, who represents an upstate district. His proposal allows anyone to be detained at any time and any place on suspicion of having entered Texas illegally, a state with a population of around 10 million people of Mexican origin.
The Texas Senate also recently approved an initiative allowing Abbott to spend an extraordinary $1.5 billion to increase surveillance on the border with Mexico, an area that has seen record numbers of illegal crossings. The politician has said he will use some of the money to expand the state’s immigration wall with Mexico, as well as other barriers that could cut off the flow of arrivals. Abbott is expected to visit the border this weekend alongside Donald Trump, who is campaigning for the 2024 election on a promise to return a tough hand to the region.
The tensions caused by the HB 4 negotiations were captured in a viral video taken inside the legislature. After the vote, Democratic Representative Armando Walle of Houston was seen visibly angry with Republican lawmakers who voted for the measure. “I can’t drive my brother, my cousin, okay. I can’t take them anywhere, bro? I can’t go to a boda [wedding], I can’t go to a baptism because my community is under attack? You don’t understand, the shit you’re doing is hurting our community,” the congressman is heard saying in the video. The Republicans simply nodded without responding.
The new law allows authorities to choose to deport to Mexico anyone suspected of entering Texas illegally. If they do not leave the United States, they could be charged with a new crime that could result in a prison sentence of between two and 20 years.
The Mexican government expressed its opposition to the measure this week. The Mexican Foreign Ministry issued a statement on Wednesday, the same day the Mexican president began a visit to the United States to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. The criminalisation of immigrants, the foreign ministry said, ‘will lead to the separation of families, discrimination and racial profiling’. Mexico also rejects a measure that would allow state authorities to detain and return nationals or foreigners to Mexican territory, the statement said.
The López Obrador government has been locked in a tug-of-war with its US counterpart over immigration for months. This was the focus of Friday’s bilateral meeting between Joe Biden and his Mexican counterpart. The two countries already have some agreements in place – at the federal level – for Mexico to take back citizens of some countries who are being deported. However, Mexico has not agreed to accept deportees from individual states or from state police forces.
Human rights organisations have made it clear that they will sue the Texas government if Abbott signs the bill into law. The bill “supersedes federal law, encourages racial profiling and harassment, and unconstitutionally empowers local law enforcement to deport people without due process, regardless of whether the immigrants are seeking asylum or other humanitarian protection,” said Oni Blair, the ACLU’s Texas director. The activist group claims that supremacist groups in the Republican stronghold have shown their support for these rules.
Representative Walle pointed out this week that the law passed by the Texas legislature is worse than the famous SB1070 passed by Arizona in 2010. This allowed police to ask anyone, at any time, for their papers to check their legal status in the country. The law was challenged in court, and its effects were undermined by several rulings by federal judges. In a landmark case in 2012, the US Supreme Court ruled that local police did not have the authority to detain a suspect solely on the basis of his or her immigration status. That responsibility, the court ruled, rested with the federal government. Since then, however, the ideological balance of the justices has shifted.