“Y’all
don’t live in our f—kin’ skin,” said Texas
Democrat Armando Walle in an angry
outburst at state Republicans in
late October 2023. Walle was confronting his
fellow lawmakers who signed a motion to limit
debate on HB 4, one of the harshest immigration
bills in the nation. The break in decorum was
reasonable considering that people who look like
Walle would likely be racially profiled as the
result of a bill that his GOP colleagues pushed
through in Texas to criminalize the transport of
undocumented immigrants in the state.
“I can’t
drive my brother, my cousin,” explained Walle
in the videotaped
interaction with GOP lawmakers at the
Texas capital in Austin. Like many Texans of
Latinx descent, Walle’s
family is mixed-status. Given that Latinx people now outnumber non-Hispanic whites in the
state, the Republican Party’s move to pass
anti-immigrant bills is a bold provocation. HB 4
is one of 3 bills that the American
Civil Liberties Union of Texas has identified as
“ignorant and dangerous.”
Another Texas Democrat,
Ana-Maria Ramos linked
the promotion and passage of such
anti-immigrant bills to “white nationalist and
xenophobic and Nazi sympathizers,” and explained
that the GOP cut off debate over the H.B. 4
because “they know it violates constitutional
rights.” The Texas
Tribune revealed that the
legislation was the brainchild of a far-right
group called Texans for Strong Borders led by a
man named Chris Russo with close ties to Nazi
sympathizer and white supremacist Nick
Fuentes. That organization, along with
several other far-right political action
committees such as Empower
Texans and Defend Texas Liberty are being funded by three
West Texas billionaires: Tim Dunn, and two
brothers named Farris and Dan Wilks.
In a nutshell: billionaires in
conjunction with overt racists are pushing a
white supremacist agenda via the Republican
Party in one of the nation’s most populous and
racially diverse states. No wonder lawmakers
like Walle and Ramos are livid.
The Texas bills are apparently
modeled on Arizona’s notorious SB
1070, a law that passed in 2010 and
galvanized immigrant rights groups and Latinx
youth into a historic
movement. The so-called “Show Me Your
Papers” law was modeled on an enforcement
practice championed by Arizona’s infamous
Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County who
repeatedly violated people’s constitutional
rights. The disgraced sheriff was eventually
convicted of criminal contempt and then pardoned by a man who shared his
values: Donald Trump.
The National
Immigration Law Center labeled Arizona’s SB 1070
“a
Cautionary Tale of Race-based Immigration
Policy,” and pointed out that even
the Arizona
Republic, a conservative newspaper,
ultimately lamented the bill’s passage saying in
an editorial that, “Arizona understands that we
don’t need a repeat of that divisive,
unproductive fiasco on the national level.”
But Texas’ anti-immigrant HB 4
is considered even worse than Arizona’s SB 1070.
Jennefer Canales-Pelaez, an attorney in Texas
with the Immigrant
Legal Resource Center told NBC
News that “The way that the law
is written is just so vague, so essentially it
is just open season on people of color
throughout the state of Texas.”
Not only does it authorize
arrests of people suspected to be transporting
undocumented immigrants, it places such
authority in the hands of any “peace officer,” a
term so vague that Canales-Pelaez says it could
include “someone who sits on the dental
examiners’ board.” Texas Republicans have
resorted to vigilante law enforcement before—in
a 2021 state-wide
abortion ban allowing for any private
citizen to sue those suspected of aiding in an
abortion.
Further, HB 4 would allow people
suspected of being undocumented to be dumped
into Mexico—regardless of their country of
origin. And, it would require a 10-year
mandatory minimum prison sentence for those convicted of
transporting any undocumented persons, including
their own family members—a sentence that is
longer than what convicted
rapists and even murderers typically get.
The bill is so egregiously
unconstitutional that legal experts predict even
the U.S. Supreme Court, stacked as it is with
conservative justices, would likely strike
it down. J. Anna Cabot at the
University of Houston Law Center told AP News,
“It’s just too cut and dry constitutionally” to
pass muster. Moreover, in 2012 the U.S. Supreme
Court struck
down most of SB 1070’s
provisions.
The Republican Party appears
to care little for the U.S. Constitution
these days, preferring instead to repeatedly
push its boundaries in service of racist
dog-whistles, knowing such moves will likely
face legal challenges but nonetheless hoping
that judicial rightwing activists on the bench
will allow them.
It’s a theatrical gamble that
appears to have multiple intentions, including
upholding racist narratives about who has the
right to live in the U.S. If HB 4 becomes law,
one can infer that it would only further fuel
anti-immigrant and racist sentiments that people
like Arpaio, Trump, and Texas Republican
lawmakers have forged their careers on—rather
like how anti-transgender
bills fuel transphobia even if they don’t remain
on the books.
Walle is convinced that HB 4
also serves as a convenient means to mobilize
rightwing voters to the polls leading into the
2024 elections. “I’ve been in the Legislature 16
years and over time there has been this
salacious appetite to feed Republican primary
voters by demonizing border issues,” he
told NBC
News. Already, the state has been
implementing a program called Operation
Lone Star to aggressively increase
border enforcement and engage in dangerous
stunts such as busing migrants to
immigrant-friendly cities.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is
also determined to push through an economic
agenda that is receiving far less
attention than the anti-immigrant legislation:
using state tax funds to subsidize private
schools. Fixated on the idea of creating savings
accounts that could divert taxes into private
school tuition, Abbott has no plans to increase
public school funding or teacher pay. His attack
on Texas’s public education system means that
Texas teachers have barely seen any pay raises
at a time of rising inflation, and schools have
been operating on deficits.
It’s critical to see such
Republican political tactics for what they are:
a means of asserting white supremacist
capitalist values in violation of the U.S.
Constitution and against the ideals of a
multi-racial democracy.
This
commentary was
produced
by Economy
for All,
a project of the
Independent
Media Institute.
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