Hundreds of protesters marched in Dallas, Texas, on Sunday to protest the state’s new immigration enforcement law, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) described as “one of the most extreme pieces of anti-immigrant legislation any state legislature has ever enacted.” A federal appeals court halted Texas’ ability to enforce the law late Tuesday.
Known as Senate Bill 4, the Supreme Court briefly allowed the law to take effect Mar. 19, however the ruling was overturned hours later when a federal appeals court allowed an earlier injunction against the law to stand. Legal experts say the Texas law could set a dangerous precedent if implemented. Similar extreme immigration legislation has been introduced in other Republican-controlled states.
Texas’ SB 4 expands the state’s immigration enforcement through several extreme clauses. The most troubling, experts say, is that it allows Texas police to arrest any individual on suspicion of having crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without authorization. That broadened authority is not only an invitation for racial profiling, it also provides cover against accountability for law enforcement, said Javier Hidalgo, the legal director at the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas-based organization that provides legal services related to immigration.
“If I go outside my house today and I get racially profiled by a police officer, I get arrested, there was no probable cause or reasonable suspicion … I could bring a case for a civil rights violation in federal court,” Hidalgo said. “Under this new law, I wouldn’t be able to do that.”
Hidalgo noted that SB 4 is part of a broader anti-immigrant effort under Gov. Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star (OLS) launched in 2021. OLS uses taxpayer dollars and state emergency funds in its efforts to curb immigration by expanding the border wall, busing migrants from Texas to sanctuary cities, and deploying the Texas National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety to the Southern border.
Similar to Abbott’s previous anti-immigrant actions, SB 4 pushes enforcement bounds to the extreme. Beyond broadening enforcement powers to untrained state police, SB 4 makes crossing the Texas-Mexico border between ports of entry a Class B misdemeanor, which can carry a jail sentence of up to six months. For additional offenses, migrants can be charged with a second-degree felony and face up to 20 years in prison. In some cases, the law also requires state judges untrained in immigration law to order the deportation of any individual to Mexico found to be in the state without authorization.
Contrary to Abbott’s claim that applying stricter immigration laws creates order at the Southern border, if enforced, SB 4 would sow disorder among agencies across Texas.
“That this would create chaos is understated,” said veteran immigration attorney Charles Foster, who advised former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on federal immigration policy. “You have thousands of multiple law enforcement agents from your local constables, sheriffs, police, overlapping jurisdictions enforcing this law with absolutely no training.”
The effects of the law are already being felt in some Texas localities, where state officials have provided no real guidance to local judges and police on how SB 4 should be enforced. For example, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office drafted its own policy on how its officers will carry out arrests under SB 4, which would require the arresting officer to assume liability for the arrest and file a report detailing how and why they questioned an individual’s immigration status. The policy also requires a supervising officer to be present at the site of the arrest. Meanwhile, the Laredo Police Department intends to use the new law to “enhance” charges on crimes perpetrated by undocumented immigrants. The Department of Public Safety has not disclosed how it plans to enforce the new law.
Hidalgo said the ambiguity of SB 4 would have a life-altering effect on his organization’s immigrant clients, with the potential for them to “disappear” without due process under the new law, an occurrence that already happens to detained migrants. The law would also hurt local communities, including U.S. citizens.
“It’s going to completely disrupt communities,” Hidalgo said. “There’s a lot of very complex relationships between migrant communities and citizen communities in our country. It’s not the simple dichotomy that it’s made out to be in the rhetoric that we’re hearing.”
In December of last year, the ACLU and other advocacy organizations sued Texas over SB 4 on behalf of El Paso County and two local immigrant rights groups. The Department of Justice brought a separate lawsuit against Texas in January, arguing that SB 4 is unconstitutional and violates the Supremacy Clause, which establishes that states are not authorized to adopt immigration laws that supersede federal regulations.
SB 4 is not the first immigration enforcement law to operate on racial biases. In 2012, the Supreme Court partially struck down Arizona’s SB 1070, known as the “show me your papers” law, that allowed local police to arrest individuals believed to be in the U.S. without authorization. SB 1070 was further rolled back in 2016 as part of a settlement agreement with immigrant rights groups. Local law enforcement in Arizona can no longer make or extend arrests based on suspicions regarding a person’s immigration status.
By comparison, the Texas bill goes much further than other similar legislation that allowed local agencies to avoid actively enforcing the law to prevent causing undue harm to communities. SB 4 mandates local authorities to comply with immigration detainers and punishes them if they do not enforce federal immigration law. Foster gave a hypothetical case: If an undocumented grandmother who has lived in the U.S. with her family for 40 years was stopped due to a traffic violation and admitted she was undocumented, the officer would have no choice but to subject her to potential deportation under SB 4.
“That officer might be in a quandary and say, ‘Well, I would not have done this, but now that I know that this grandmother has been here for 40 years and is undocumented, I have no choice but to physically transport her to the Mexican bridge … or to put her in front of a local judiciary,’” Foster said.
If SB 4 is allowed to be implemented, it could have far-reaching consequences beyond immigration policy. According to Hidalgo, there’s a risk of setting a precedent that invites other states to copy Texas’ law that essentially allows police officers to racially profile.
Earlier this month, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed an immigration bill, that like Texas’s SB 4, would have allowed local police to engage in immigration enforcement and would have classified border crossings between ports of entry as misdemeanors. Similar immigration enforcement laws are currently making their way through the legislature in the Republican-led states of Georgia, Missouri, and Iowa.
