Officials in different areas of Texas are nervously waiting to find out if the state's tough new immigration law will be enforced and how it will affect their communities.
The law states that entering Texas outside of an official entry point is a state crime. Offenders can face up to six months in jail for the first offense and up to 20 years for subsequent crossings.
On Tuesday, Texas Senate Bill 4, or SB4, briefly went into effect after a dramatic series of rulings. However, it was then halted again by an urgent decision on Tuesday night. Supreme Court decision — only to be stayed again by an eleventh-hour decision Tuesday night.
Now, as the law is once again brought before the highly conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, local officials are unsure about what will happen next.
“It’s been a complete whiplash for pretty much all local government,” said El Paso County Attorney Bernardo Cruz, who is part of the group that sued the state.
Cruz mentioned that every time the law becomes effective again, there is a chance that someone might end up in their county jail under a law that could potentially be deemed unconstitutional.
The local sheriff, district attorney, and judges are the ones who may have to receive a detainee at 3 a.m. and figure out what the law requires them to do.
These officials have to prepare for a situation that may or may not happen, and they need to do so in real-time. It's difficult to plan ahead because of the broad scope of the law.
According to Cruz, many issues with the law have yet to be resolved. For instance, if a state judge orders someone to go to Mexico, who is responsible for transporting them there?
Or, he asked, what if they are sent from an inland city like Amarillo to be deported from a border community like El Paso — and then refuse to return to Mexico, which leads to their arrest? Which county is accountable for detaining and trying them?
“You know, these are all questions that are not very exciting, legally speaking, or maybe even to the wider public. But I think those are questions that local governments have to grapple with.”
A lot of the confusion stems from SB4 being a new concept. The law involves a significant expansion of Texas state authority into an area traditionally handled by the federal government, which has usually prevented states from getting involved in immigration enforcement.
Texas has justified this extension based on the belief that it faces an “invasion” from Mexico, a claim that federal Judge David Ezra rejected. This led him to put enforcement of the law on hold while the legal battle between the Biden administration and the state of Texas unfolded in court. enforcement of the law on hold while the legal fight between the Biden administration and the state of Texas played out in court.
That ruling marked the beginning of a dizzying series of reversals.
The day after Ezra’s decision, the 5th Circuit overruled his stay, which the Biden administration appealed to the Supreme Court — with ambiguous and confusing results.
On Tuesday, the high court allowed the law to go into effect temporarily, but issued no ruling as to whether it was constitutional — instead directing the 5th Circuit to rule promptly on whether it was legal.
The court of appeals arranged an urgent hearing for Wednesday night and temporarily stopped the law from being enforced during that time.
University of Texas at Austin law professor Steve Vladeck criticized the repeated conflicting rulings before a decision on the legality of the measure, calling it chaotic. told The Texas Tribune.
He stated, “Even if that means SB4 remains paused indefinitely, hopefully everyone can agree that this kind of judicial whiplash is bad for everyone.”
During a discussion on Wednesday morning, 5th Circuit justices seemed split in their opinion according to The Texas Tribune.
The uncertainty of whether the law will have an impact beyond the immediate Texas-Mexico border adds another layer of complexity, affecting undocumented immigrants, their families, and the authorities.
That possibility remains theoretical, as 5th Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham, a Trump appointee, noted Wednesday.
Oldham remarked, “We have no clue how any of this would actually be enforced, because there’s not been a single person who has been arrested.”
“So we’re predicting all of this.”
In arguments in February before Judge Ezra, state attorneys made a point to argue that SB4 would be applicable only when migrants were seen crossing the border, not for those residing in places like Houston.
During the roughly 8 hours that the law was in effect on Tuesday, local law enforcement officials across Texas released statements essentially stating that immigration enforcement was not their responsibility.
The El Paso County sheriff’s office, for example, said it wouldn’t prioritize enforcing the law and that immigration enforcement was the job of the federal government. “Involving local law enforcement in this is problematic,” a departmental spokesperson stated. Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia acknowledged that the law was causing concern for some in the community and assured that his department would continue to enforce the existing state law prohibiting racial profiling..
Similar statements were made by cities including
, and Houston — and in smaller cities San Antonio, Austinsuch as Lubbock , where Maverick County Sheriff Tom Schmerber told a local newspaper that enforcing the law was “impossible.”“What if we deport a U.S. citizen?” Schmerber said. “My deputies are not trained for immigration work.”
Other very conservative sheriffs echoed this same fundamental theme — including Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn, who wrote in a
post on social media that Texans were “frustrated with the continued onslaught of illegal entry into this country and the federal government’s unwillingness to act.” But after this preamble, Waybourn also said SB4 would likely fall outside his remit because it was “unlikely that law enforcement in North Texas will have knowledge of an individual’s illegal entry status to enforce” the law since they would not have been able to observe the crossing themselves.
idea was repeated
That by bill sponsor and state Rep. Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler), who wrote on social media that “SB4 was NOT designed for interior enforcement” and that expecting “local police in the interior (e.g., Ft. Worth) to engage in SB 4 enforcement misses the mark.” But sheriffs — and the prosecutors who try their cases — may not have much choice, Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee, whose jurisdiction encompasses the bulk of Houston, told The Hill.
Even if police and sheriff’s commands try to stay out of direct enforcement, he said, “Hispanic and Latino communities will run the risk of being profiled. In large law enforcement agencies, even if there’s an edict from the top, they can’t guarantee that will make its way to every single officer.”
But there’s a bigger risk, he said. If SB4 is ultimately upheld, “there’s going to be pressure from the state and elected officials trying to coerce and pressure law enforcement agencies to enforce the law in a broad and discriminatory way.”
The legal infrastructure for this to happen already exists. Last year, the state Legislature
passed a bill to remove “rogue” district attorneys who don’t prosecute state crimes. That bill was targeted at district attorneys who don’t prosecute those who aid women in getting an abortion, but it can apply more broadly. In January, Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued five Texas municipalities for halting their
prosecution of marijuana laws That law — in conjunction with broader moves by the state Legislature and executives.
to curtail cities’ power — puts local officials in a tough situation, Menefee said. “Given that many of the heads of law enforcement agencies in the state of Texas or the head of those officers are elected, I think you very well can see state officials looking for ways to take punitive action against them if they have a policy — written or unwritten not to enforce the law.”
“So that’s why it’s a big deal. It won’t just be the bully pulpit. It could be threats of funding, and it can also be threats of going after elected officials.”
That’s a possibility some officials are delicately trying to get in front of.
In his guidance
to deputies, Sheriff Julio Salazar of Bexar County, home to San Antonio — and nearly two-thirds Hispanic — sought to walk a narrow line between prospective state immigration laws and active federal racial-profiling laws. “We need our deputies to understand that … we may not be allowed to tell you ‘you can’t enforce a law,’ right? That’s not what we’re saying,” Salazar said.
“What we are saying, though, is, ‘If you choose to do it, you’re assuming some liability for yourself. You’re putting this agency in a whole lot of liability.'”
Local officials across Texas are anxiously waiting to see whether the state’s harsh new immigration law will take effect — and how it will impact their communities. The law makes entering Texas outside a port of entry a state crime, punishable in the first instance by up to six months in jail and in subsequent…
