Texas was in a state of confusion early on Wednesday in the hours after another freeze on the controversial new state law that would allow local law enforcement to arrest migrants – the legal jurisdiction of the federal government – hours after the US supreme court had allowed it.
There was puzzlement, after the law had effectively been in force for a few hours and was then blocked by an appeals court around midnight, about whether and when state troopers or Texas national guard soldiers – who have the most interaction with migrants – would begin enforcement.
The Kinney county sheriff, Brad Coe, who has largely embraced hard-right Texas governor Greg Abbott’s multibillion-dollar border enforcement effort, said he was “prepared to proceed with prosecutions” but officers would need “probable cause” to make arrests. His county covers a stretch of border near Del Rio that was recently the busiest corridor for illegal crossings but quieted considerably.
“It is unlikely that observers will see an overnight change,” Coe said.
El Paso county judge Ricardo Samaniego, the top county executive, said immigration enforcement should remain a federal, not state, responsibility, echoing the Biden administration’s view.
He said heightened law enforcement presence in the city of El Paso during a previous migrant surge brought high-speed chases and traffic stops based on assumptions that passengers were in the country illegally.
“We had accidents, we had injuries, we got a little glimpse of what would happen if the state begins to control what happens in respect to immigration,” Samaniego said.
The impact of the battle royale between state and federal powers over immigration law extends far beyond the Texas border. Republican legislators wrote the law so that it applies in all of the state’s 254 counties, although Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas department of public safety, has said he expects it will mostly be enforced near the border.
Ater the latest in a series of contradictory court rulings, Lina Hidalgo, the judge of Harris county, centered on Houston, told CNN that “absolutely” there was confusion in the state and that “even legal experts are calling it whiplash.” She is opposed to the law.
Abbott has claimed there is an “invasion” of Texas by unauthorized migrants, allowing him to take immigration power into the state’s own hands as if it was on some sort of war footing.
“It makes me nervous because the law is focussed on whether you are suspected of being an immigrant, it’s so extreme, it allows law enforcement to say ‘you look brown, you look Hispanic’ and you can be arrested and then possibly deported,” she told the cable news channel on Wednesday morning.
Hidalgo said many members of law enforcement she dealt with were not prepared to enforce the law. She told CNN she could imagine a scenario where she herself went for a jog and be stopped by local police saying: “you look like you may be here on an undocumented basis” and said: “This is a terrible precedent.”
An appeals judge just before midnight on Tuesday said that no matter how strongly Texas disagreed with the federal government’s application of immigration law at the US-Mexico border, it did not justify the state’s defiance of the US constitution.
The new Texas law attempts to take the power from the federal government to say that crossing into Texas from a foreign country is a crime unless you are crossing via a legal port of entry, including if you cross the Rio Grande, the river that divides Texas from Mexico, with hopes of claiming asylum but without an appointment with the US authorities. Anyone apprehended could be arrested by local or state police and charged with a misdemeanor in state court or with a felony for a repeat alleged violation. Migrants could be ordered to return to Mexico – even though the Mexican government quickly said it would not accept non-Mexicans thus expelled.
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Other Republican-led states far from the border are also already looking to follow Texas’ path. In Iowa, more than a thousand miles from the Mexico border, the state House on Tuesday gave final approval to a bill that would also give its state law enforcement the power to arrest people who they deem to be in the US illegally and have previously been denied entry into the country.
Skylor Hearn, executive director of the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, said sheriffs’ offices have been training since last year.
“If a county chooses to take it on themselves, they are choosing for their taxpayers to take it on themselves as well,” Hearn said. “As long as the federal government is willing to do its part that it is supposed to be doing, it is ideal for them to take possession and custody of these people.”
Daniel Morales, an associate professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, said the Texas law “will be a mess, very clearly, to enforce”.
Arrests for unauthorized crossings fell by half in January from a record-high of 250,000 in December, with sharp declines in Texas.
Tucson, Arizona, has been the busiest corridor in recent months, followed by San Diego in January, but reasons for sudden shifts are often complicated and are dictated by smuggling organizations.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
