Texas Leads Race To Bottom To Demonize Immigrants
Of late, the lone star state is where huge buoys were installed and miles of deadly, razor wire erected along the Rio Grande River to create potentially fatal obstacles to immigrants trying to cross into Texas from Mexico.
It is the state whose Republican Party shamelessly voted against banning Neo-Nazis from associating with the GOP.
And it is the state that has cruelly challenged the right of a pregnant woman to abort a fetus which has a deadly genetic disease and without an abortion will endanger the mother’s life or possibility of ever having future children.
This state’s governor has refused to distance himself or criticize trump for his violent, Hitleresque rhetoric that immigrants are “invading” and “poisoning” the country and should be detained in sprawling concentration camps. In the same breath, the governor is quiet while trump describes his political opponents as “vermin” that need to be eliminated.
And now, the latest action’s goals are to dehumanize, demonize and criminalize immigrants and return to the cruel and draconian efforts of the trump administration. To that end, the state is taking matters into its own hands by empowering police to detain and arrest anyone they suspect to be undocumented immigrants and to demand their citizenship papers, an exercise dating back to the dark years of World War II when the Nazis hunted Jews “without papers.”
Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the newest effort to stem the flow of immigrants this week, as part of his party’s effort to point out how the Biden administration is weak on restricting illegal immigration. The bill was sponsored by Republican state Sen. Charles Perry who said it is designed in response to “cartel enterprise, terrorist infiltration, fentanyl crises, human smuggling where people are treated as commodities. This is a response for Texas to do what it needs to do to protect the citizens under an imminent and undeniable threat.”
The law is quickly generating pushback from the federal authorities who claim that the state has no jurisdiction to create or enforce immigration laws.
The confrontation between Texas and the federal government is the latest development in a concerted effort by red, Republican states to defy the federal government, particularly in the area of immigration. Defying the federal government can be traced directly to trump and his allies, who have long squealed against the “deep state” and vowed to “drain the swamp.”
Trump has further poisoned the states’ relationship with the federal government by claiming that he is the victim of a Democratic witch hunt by a “weaponized” Justice Department and that he was robbed of the 2020 election, despite multiple investigations which show there was no widespread voter fraud.
Texas is the latest but not the only state to ignore federal regulations. In May, presidential hopeful, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., signed a bill allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions despite the supreme court banning capital punishment in such cases. That same month, Gov. Kay Ivey, R-Ala., signed into law a redistricting map that ignored a supreme court ruling ordering the state to draw two Black-majority congressional districts.
For his part, months ago Abbott authorized installation of about 1,000 feet of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande. The justice department sued Abbott over the floating barrier for humanitarian and environmental reasons. A federal appeals court has ruled the buoys and razor wire must come down while Abbott has threatened to ask the Supreme Court to reverse the decision.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the House have said they will not agree to military funding for Israel and Ukraine without major changes in the immigration laws. The Democrats’ proposed $14 billion bill would increase the number of border agents, install new devices to detect fentanyl traversing the border and boost asylum processing staff.
The most recent Texas legislation, Senate Bill 4, gives state police officers the power to detain, search and arrest immigrants who police believe have unlawfully entered the country. The immigrants could have the charges dropped if they agree before a state magistrate to leave the country. If they don’t leave or if Mexico refuses them entry, immigrants can be charged with a felony that carries up to 20 years in prison.
The new law bars police from arresting migrants in public or private schools; churches and other places of worship; healthcare facilities; and facilities that provide forensic medical examinations to sexual assault survivors. The bill doesn’t prohibit arrests on college or university campuses.
The Texas law would be in violation of a 2012, Supreme Court ruling that rejected Arizona’s stop and identify law, known as the “Show Me Your Papers” bill, which allowed state police to check residents’ immigration status.
The phrase “Your papers, please” is associated with the police state demanding identification from citizens during random stops or at checkpoints. During the Nazi regime, the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany, demanded to see people’s papers to identify Jews and other groups targeted by the regime.
Margaret Hu of Duke University School of Law said in a column in The Jurist that “however overstated or inappropriate the comparison (with Nazi Germany), and whatever the outcome of the legal challenges, passing a law that requires people to show their papers on demand does not seem to sit right with American culture.”
The phrase was popularized in the 1942 movie “Casablanca” which depicted life in Vichy-controlled Casablanca during World War II. The first line of the film is spoken by a police officer to a civilian he stopped on the street: “May we see your papers, please?” The civilian attempts to flee the police but he is shot dead.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Texas Civil Rights Project have filed a lawsuit on behalf of El Paso County and two immigrant aid groups that the new law is unconstitutional and preempted by federal law. The ACLU of Texas called the law the nation’s “most extreme anti-immigration law” and that it will lead to “racial profiling” and “harassment” with motorists stopped because of their skin color or the language they speak.
Abbott has said that major enhancement in immigration enforcement is needed to stem a wave of overdose deaths from fentanyl, which Abbott said is being imported by Mexican drug traffickers which he called “foreign terrorist organizations.” However, since hitting a peak in February 2023, fentanyl seizures had by October fallen by half amid Homeland Security interdiction operations such as operations Blue Lotus and Artemis.
The new Texas law also allocates $1.54 billion in funding for Texas to run its own border patrol and build a border wall. Trump campaigned in 2016 to build the wall that Mexico would fund. The Biden administration has opposed further construction of the wall which was partly built under trump, without Mexican aid.
The Texas anti-immigration efforts are an effort to return to the cruel and draconian measures put in place under trump.
The trump administration imposed a “zero tolerance” policy which led to the separation of thousands of children from their parents. More than 650 children were separated from their parents during a two-week period in May as a result of the new approach being implemented. After public backlash, Trump signed an executive order to instead detain families together.
The Trump administration also initiated the “Remain in Mexico” program, which sent tens of thousands of migrants seeking asylum back to Mexico to await their immigration court proceedings. The Biden administration ended the program after winning support in a 2022 Supreme Court ruling.
Trump has said that, if he is reelected, he will create ever harsher situations to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, including providing military funding to develop sprawling camps to house undocumented immigrants pending their removal from the U.S. He would reinstitute the “Remain in Mexico” program and would ban travel to the U.S. of people from certain countries or with certain ideologies, including the Gaza Strip, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and “anywhere else that threatens our security.”
Trump also said he would seek to block “communists, Marxists and socialists” from entering the United States.
A 2021 study by the libertarian Cato Institute determined that trump’s efforts while president reduced legal immigration but not illegal immigration. By November 2020, the trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453 and the number of non‐immigrant visas by at least 11,178,668 during his first term.
“President Trump entered the White House with the goal of eliminating illegal immigration but Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement and the stabilization of the illegal immigrant population,” the institute noted. “Thus, Trump succeeded in reduce legal immigration and failed to eliminate illegal immigration.”
According to the institute, in 2020, the “removal of illegal immigrants from the interior of the United States was the lowest as an absolute number and as a share of the illegal immigration population since ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was created in 2003.”
Some Senate Republicans have criticized trump for his racist and xenophobic remarks, including the Republican minority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. McConnell said trump is a hypocrite as he appointed McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, who is Taiwanese American, to serve as secretary of Transportation in 2016.
“It strikes me that didn’t bother him (trump) when he appointed Elaine Chao the secretary of Transportation,” McConnell said.
Senate Whip John Thune, R- S.D., also was mildly critical of trump and said, “My grandfather was an immigrant, so I don’t agree with that sentiment.”
Others applauded trump for his comments, including Sen. J.D. Vance, R- Ohio, who said that it was “objectively and obviously true” that “illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country.” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R.-Ala., a strong trump supporter, said trump’s words were not nearly strong enough.
“I’m mad he wasn’t tougher than that because you’re seeing what’s happening on the border? We’re being overrun,” Tuberville said.
Regarding the Texas Republican Party, its executive committee passed two resolutions unanimously: one supporting Israel after the deadly October 7th Hamas terror attacks, and the other denouncing anti-Semitism. The committee, however, removed a clause that “The Republican Party of Texas have no association whatsoever with any individual or organization that is known to espouse anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sympathies, or Holocaust denial.”
Republicans said the clause was unnecessary because there is no difference between anti-Semitism and pro-Nazi sympathies.