A Texas bill creating a state-run “border protection unit” has been revived.
HB 20 would create a state immigration unit to “arrest, detain, or detain persons crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally,” something that has traditionally been the domain of the federal government.
The statewide push comes alongside a broader Republican attack on what they characterize as President Biden’s “open border policy.”
While the administration has promoted a lot its new border enforcement measuresand Federal Border Patrol reports that encounters with migrants are a quarter below last yearRepublicans have described the situation at the border in apocalyptic terms.
“The brutal reality of Biden’s immigration agenda should be shock the conscience of all Americans,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote in a statement Wednesday.
“Biden’s policies allow monstrous gang members, terrorists, human traffickers, drug dealers, and violent criminals into our country and demonstrate that the president is willing to sacrifice American lives for his open borders agenda.” Paxton added.
Paxton’s comments came just before the Friday night expiration of Title 42, a Trump-era law that has been used 2.8 million times since March 2020. expel asylum seekers.
On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted in favor of HB 2, a sweeping bill that, among far moremakes asylum applications more stringent, restarts construction of the Trump-era border wall, and reopens immigration prisons closed by the Biden administration.
Another clause in the national bill would allow unaccompanied minors to be returned “safely and expeditiously to their country of origin.”
But with that bill facing almost certain death in the Senate and a Biden veto, Texas is going it alone with HB 20, in a move that risks clashing with the federal government if it passes.
The bill makes immigration advocates see a dire threat.
“House Bill 20 (HB20) is the most dangerous piece of border legislation we’ve seen,” the Texas Civil Rights Project wrote in a summary of the bill in April.
The Texas bill faces a narrow window in the passage. Democrats nearly sank it on procedural grounds last week, but Republicans successfully resurrected it this weekThe Texas Tribune reported.
The new unit would be authorized to act only in the overwhelmingly Hispanic counties on the Texas-Mexico border, where they would be allowed to “arrest, detain, or detain persons illegally crossing the Texas-Mexico border to deter persons attempting to cross the border illegally.”
The bill would also give the state new legal powers that prosecutors could use against migrants. It establishes a Texas-only version of Title 42. It also makes it a crime for anyone to “knowingly” trespass on private land while entering the state, effectively criminalizing entering the state outside of a port of entry. entry, according to the Texas Civil Rights Project.
This turns a crime that was previously a misdemeanor into a crime equal to kidnapping.
The bill’s sponsor state Rep. Matt Schaefer (R) told Austin affiliate FOX that the state needs HB 20 to provide additional manpower to replace Texas National Guard units currently on the border under Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) Operation Lone Star.
Since 2021, the governor’s office has deployed thousands of military units to the border, a cause for which they are unfit, Schaefer said.
In his interview with FOX, the representative pointed to a video of National Guard soldiers at the border. “That sergeant over there by the river is a diesel mechanic from East Texas. He has to go back to his job and in fact the state can only keep him on active duty orders for a certain amount of time Schaefer said.
“So we have a temporary workforce that applies to a full-time problem.”
While members of the state’s new border force would not have to be law enforcement officers, the bill gives them access, in the event of a civil suit or criminal prosecution, to “any affirmative defense or defense that applies to a peace officer.”
That has Texas Democrats worried it could lead to “vigilante” harassment of Latino citizens in Texas’ border counties.
It also authorizes those officers to use “non-lethal crowd control measures,” although Schaefer implied in the Fox interview that they would shoot if threatened.
“Our officers will be able to protect themselves and have self-defense,” he said. “Border Protection Unit officers will have the authority to do what they need to do to protect Texas on the river.”
“What is prohibiting or preventing a Border Protection Unit from establishing its post in Hispanic neighborhoods?” asked Rep. Erin Gámez (D-Brownsville), who represents a city of nearly 200,000 residents (almost 90 percent of whom are Hispanic) at the mouth of the Rio Grande.
Other Democratic lawmakers echoed those concerns.
“One of the most troubling provisions overall is the racial profiling that we believe will occur,” said Rep. Victoria Neave Criado (D). he said the House.
Criado noted that the bill empowers the governor to call out the Border Patrol unit in the event of a “state of invasion or imminent danger.”
That’s the same rhetoric, he noted, that the El Paso mass shooter cited in explaining why did he massacre 25 people at a Walmart in El Paso.
That “individual from North Texas drove to El Paso because of language like the word ‘invasion,’ where people are painting our communities as invaders from this state,” he said.
In the April interview, Schaefer rejected the idea that the unit would be “vigilantes,” saying, “They will be professional state employees under the authority of the Department’s Public Safety Commission.”
He also rejected the idea that these units were “death squads”.
“This is just somebody trying to scare people,” Schaefer said.
Schaefer admitted that “we’re kind of in uncharted territory” when it comes to the relationship between Texas and state governments. The Constitution, after all, gives primary responsibility for international borders to the federal government.
But state conservatives have abandoned the idea that the constitution “does not thus strip states of the power to defend themselves,” Joshua Treviño of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation wrote in a public comment supporting the bill.
“I think Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution talks about a state being in imminent danger. And when people are dying, women and children are being exploited in large numbers, then I think Texans are in imminent danger and we have to step up and take a fundamentally bolder approach,” Schaefer told Fox.
