In response to President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda, citizens and governments at the state and local level are passing “sanctuary city” laws. These are laws that simply state that local police will not cooperate with national police forces, like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to detain and deport undocumented people.
In Texas, however, the administration of Republican Governor Greg Abbot passed a law on May 5 that would effectively void any sanctuary laws that county and city governments pass.
What makes Texas Senate Bill 4 more concerning is the power that it grants to local police agencies and elected officials to persecute people of color. The law allows public officials like city council members, county commissioners, city and district attorneys and university campus police officers the power to ask about a person’s immigration status. To ensure compliance with the law, it will punish officials for making policy that try to stop or not comply with this racist practice.
State officials can now remove any elected or appointed official who limits the enforcement of the law or cooperating with immigration officials. Law enforcement officials like sheriffs, police chiefs, constables and jail administrators could face a Class A misdemeanor charge. This could mean fines of $1,000 to $1,500 for the first offense and $20,000 to $25,500 for each one after that.
This is a new chapter in the long struggle for immigrants, both documented and undocumented, to have basic rights in the United States. Ironically, underlying the efforts of the U.S. to suppress immigration, is the fact that most of the immigration to the United States in the past century has been from countries that have suffered at the hands of U.S. imperialism.
Immigrants have always suffered from harassment from citizens, police groups, and party and government officials. Politicians often use racism to organize a base of voters to get elected often resulting in immigrants being stigmatized and maltreated by both citizens and police forces.
By passing SB4, the state of Texas has not only made it dangerous for undocumented persons to stand up, but for ordinary people to stand with them.
The Republican Party purport to be the party of small government.
However, as SB 4 proves, the majority Republican state is stripping smaller country and city governments of their power. Also, the parties at the local and national levels have no issue expanding the power and the size the state to deal out oppression to minority communities.
What will end this hate isn’t the Democratic Party, whose last presidential candidate said that childhood arrivals should be deported back to a country the U.S. destabilized in order to send a message. What will end these types of practices is a state in which the workers have control.
When workers realize that the enemy facing them isn’t people from other countries, but their bosses and the capitalist class that exploits immigrants and citizens, then laws like SB4 will leave the national imagination.
