Lawmakers in Republican-controlled states who support President Donald Trump's mass deportation policies are pushing increasingly restrictive measures in their state legislatures that could reshape immigration enforcement and further restrain the lives of migrants, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
This wave of proposed laws and policies in so many GOP-controlled states challenges long-established legal precedents ensuring undocumented immigrants have access to state legal, medical and education services.
Texas is leading the way, with legislators in Austin pursuing a number of measures — including fingerprinting undocumented migrant children, barring undocumented migrants from receiving taxpayer-funded legal aid, creating a Texas Border Protection Unit and giving state law enforcement the power to deport migrants stopped near the border.
"The states have been playing a significant role in this broader narrative on immigration, both politically and administratively," said Rick Su, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. "States have been driving the political debate."
Presented with "inconvenient constitutional limitations," he said, lawmakers have resorted to "workarounds" such as tallying costs and certifying bounty hunters. Beyond testing the boundaries of federal law, they're also sending migrant communities a message, according to Su.
"The main mechanism for these things is the chilling effect," he said.
Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants' Rights Project agreed, adding that "these laws are part of a broader effort to ... make life as miserable as possible for immigrants," The Washington Post reported.
He insisted that "the states have no business regulating immigration … and well over 100 years of Supreme Court precedent backs that up. The strategy here is to terrify people."
However, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, has stressed that "what the states are trying to do is claw back some authority on immigration as long as it's not contradictory to federal immigration law."
He disagrees with the argument that states have no authority in this arena, saying that "they have a role. They're co-sovereigns."
Jennie Murray, who heads the National Immigration Forum, suggested that states' immigration restrictions could backfire, costing them more money, creating a patchwork of uneven statutes and destabilizing communities, according to The Washington Post.
"To protect ourselves and truly be secure, we maintain that immigration enforcement absolutely must continue to be a federal priority and jurisdiction only," said Murray, whose group advocates for what it considers "the value of immigrants and immigration to the nation."
But Missouri State Sen. David Gregory said he thinks the immigration issue is a fight worth having for conservatives.
"You're not going to just sit back and hope things change," he said last week. "Trump's going to do an outstanding job, but do you think waiting until we have another Biden administration to get ahead of this works? I don't."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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