In recent days, the Texas State Senate has moved a step closer to passing a bill that would empower state police to arrest migrants crossing the US-Mexico border into the Lone Star State, a provision that has alarmed civil rights advocates.
On Thursday night, the state Senate advanced SB 11, which would create a new state crime for illegally entering Texas from Mexico.
The proposal, which passed by an initial vote of 19-12, still needs to be voted on by the full chamber before being sent to the state House of Representatives.
“It is carefully tailored to avoid interfering with federal immigration enforcement authority while providing law enforcement with an important new tool to deter improper or illegal entry into Texas,” sponsor Sen. Brian Birdwell, a Republican, said of the measure during a committee meeting.
Critics said the measure could overwhelm local jails and cost the state tens of thousands of dollars a day to enforce.
“My concern is that the state of Texas could be adding a layer on top of what we are dealing with in terms of both border security and a humanitarian crisis that has developed and continues to affect our communities,” Sen. César Blanco, a Democrat, said of the bill.
Civil rights advocates also have concerns about SB 11.
“We’ve seen before that laws like this lead to unlawful racial profiling, arrests, and detentions of both U.S. citizens and immigrants,” said Sarah Mehta, senior border policy counsel at the ACLU.
The group said Texas Governor Gregg Abbott has “repeatedly abused the legal system in a relentless campaign against asylum seekers and immigrants in Texas”.
“This dangerous attempt to criminalise immigrants is cruel and comes at a high cost to our communities.”
In July, the Justice Department said it intended to sue the state over Operation Lone Star, a sweeping initiative by Governor Abbott to deploy state troopers and military-style barriers along the border to enforce immigration laws.
Immigration is a federal responsibility, but thousands of immigrants have been arrested by state troopers for trespassing on private property and allegedly held in jail for weeks without charge.
The governor’s office previously told The Independent that Operation Lone Star had led to the apprehension of more than 393,000 unauthorised immigrants and the deportation of more than 49,000 illegal immigrants, as well as more than 31,000 arrests, “all of whom would otherwise have made their way into communities across Texas and our country thanks to President Biden’s open-borders policies”.
According to an investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica and The Marshall Project, state police arrested far more trespassers than cartel members, and allegedly inflated Operation Lone Star data by including arrests for crimes such as cockfighting, sexual assault and stalking in their success statistics, even though these crimes had no clear connection to immigration enforcement.
As The Independent has reported, the governor has relied on a constitutional theory that Texas is under ‘invasion’ by migrants to justify the military-style build-up at the border, even though legal experts say courts have repeatedly rejected this interpretation of immigration powers.
