© Reuters. The U.S.-Mexico border is seen close to Sasabe, Pima County, Arizona, U.S. September 8, 2018. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson/ File Photograph
By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) -Civil rights teams filed a lawsuit on Tuesday difficult a brand new Republican-backed legislation in Texas that can give state officers broad powers to arrest, prosecute, and deport individuals who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
The lawsuit filed in federal court docket in Austin, Texas, claims that the legislation signed by Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Monday unlawfully infringes upon the authority of the federal authorities below the U.S. Structure to implement the nation’s immigration legal guidelines.
The teams, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), additionally mentioned the legislation, which takes impact in March, illegally bars migrants from making use of to the U.S. authorities for asylum or different humanitarian protections.
The legislation, often called SB4, makes it a state crime to illegally enter or re-enter Texas from a overseas nation and provides state and native legislation enforcement authorities the ability to arrest and prosecute violators. It additionally permits state judges to order that people be deported, with as much as 20-year jail sentences for migrants who refuse to conform.
The Republican-controlled Texas legislature handed the measure in November.
Abbott’s workplace and the workplace of Texas Lawyer Normal Ken Paxton didn’t instantly reply to requests for remark.
Adriana Pinon, authorized director of the ACLU’s Texas chapter, mentioned the legislation was one of the excessive immigration enforcement measures taken by a U.S. state and would result in racial profiling of minorities by police.
“The bill overrides bedrock constitutional principles and flouts federal immigration law while harming Texans, in particular Brown and Black communities,” Pinon mentioned in a press release.
The ACLU is representing two Texas-based immigrant advocacy teams and El Paso County, Texas within the lawsuit. The county says it’ll see as much as 8,000 extra arrests per yr because of the legislation, at a value of $24 million. The brand new legislation additionally will intervene with the county’s coverage of solely incarcerating individuals who pose a excessive danger to public security, in keeping with the grievance.
Abbott on Monday mentioned the legislation was crucial due to the failure of Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to stem a spike in unlawful migration.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration legislation at Cornell Legislation College, mentioned earlier than the lawsuit was filed that the Texas legislation was susceptible to authorized challenges. Yale-Loehr cited a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court docket ruling that mentioned Arizona couldn’t authorize state officers to arrest and prosecute folks for being in the US illegally, as a result of that was the unique province of the federal authorities.
Paxton, a Republican, advised state lawmakers throughout a listening to in March that the 2012 resolution “didn’t make a lot of sense” and that passing SB4 might give the Supreme Court docket’s conservative majority an opportunity to revisit the ruling.
Texas is already embroiled in a sequence of court docket instances associated to Abbott’s efforts to discourage and punish unlawful border crossings, collectively often called Operation Lone Star.
On Tuesday, a U.S. appeals court docket quickly blocked the Biden administration from destroying razor wire fencing that Texas positioned alongside its border with Mexico to discourage unlawful border crossings.
Earlier this month, the identical court docket upheld a decide’s ruling requiring Texas to take away a 1,000-foot-long (305-meter) floating barrier it positioned within the Rio Grande river.
