AUSTIN, Texas — Texas Republicans want to allow state police officers to enforce immigration laws and even order migrants who cross illegally to return to Mexico.
The Texas House of Representatives passed H.B. 4 last night after a heated floor debate. District 68 Representative David Spiller said Texas needed to step up and do what the federal government won't.
"We have a crisis at our southern border. An unprecedented number of people, including a growing number of documented terrorists, drugs and weapons continue to cross our border into Texas," Spiller said. "Our cries for help and for enforcement of our federal immigration laws have been ignored by president Biden. We have had enough... House Bill 4 is a landmark bill that allows Texans to protect Texas and send illegal immigrants back and prosecute and incarcerate those that refuse to leave."
H.B. 4 would allow all police officers in the state to remove migrants who entered Texas from any location that is not a legal port of entry. The law states, "A peace officer who is charging a person detained for a violation of this section with committing an offense under this section may, in lieu of arresting the person or taking the person before a magistrate, remove the person by: (1)A collecting available identifying information of the person...(2) transporting the person to a port of entry; and (3) ordering the person to return to the foreign nation from which the person entered or attempted to enter."
Immigration attorney Gerardo Menchaca told KENS 5 Thursday the bill has multiple issues that puts it at odds with federal law but the biggest issue would be with trying to return people to Mexico unilaterally.
"If you have a person in custody that has an immigration issue you turn them over to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and then they figure out what to do with it," Menchaca said. "Federal law may not be enforced by the state government. That is a well established principle decided by the Supreme Court over and over again."
Menchaca further said that, if an officer did try to order someone back across the bridge to Mexico it wouldn't be an enforceable order. Additionally, if an officer attempted this, federal officials at the border would likely step in.
"If ICE sees that you are getting out of a police patrol (car) and being turned away and told to walk back into Mexico, they are not going to allow that to happen. They are going to say, "whoa, we deport.' They are going to detain those people and then ultimately they will be deported by ICE, by the federal government," Menchaca said.
Menchaca also said it would be a violation of the law to force a person back into Mexico if they are not from Mexico in the first place. Additionally, police officers would likely not have access to the federal databases needed to determine a person's immigration status. H.B. 4 does state that a peace officer should attempt to get the status by "collecting available identifying information of the person, which may include the use of photographic and biometric measures that are cross-referenced with all relevant local, state, and federal criminal databases." Unfortunately, officers may not have access to those databases.
"The officers who they are making responsible for the arrests are not trained to do that," Menchaca said. "The officers who are trained to do that are the ones who work for the department of homeland security or the federal government and they go though years of training. Determining whether someone is undocumented is not as easy as one might think."
Texas Republicans faced plenty of pushback and a slew of amendments before eventually passed the House with an 84-60 vote. Before it passed, Representative Victoria Neave Criado said all attorneys invited to testify on the bill's committee hearing identified problems.
"There was not a single attorney that said it was constitutional and, in fact, every practicing immigration attorney stated that House Bill 4 likely had constitutional violations," Neave Criado said.
Menchaca also said the bill would be immediately challenged if signed by the Governor.
"If this ever passed this case would immediately go to court and more than likely it would be immediately struck down," Menchaca said.