Nearly a year since Texas adopted a law authorizing state and local law enforcement officers to arrest undocumented migrants crossing their territory, Republican lawmakers in at least 11 states have attempted to adopt similar measures, capitalizing on immigration’s prominence in the presidential election. 2024.
The fate of the proposals – six have been enacted or are under consideration, and Louisiana is expected to enact its measure as early as next week – is still being litigated. In a case before a federal appeals court, Texas is defending its law by arguing that illegal immigration is a form of invasion, allowing it to expand its power to protect its borders. Federal courts have previously ruled that, from a constitutional perspective, the definition of the term invasion is limited to military attacks.
States have tested the limits of their power over immigration before, but lawyers and legal experts said this year’s effort was accompanied by what amounted to a public relations campaign.
In campaign speeches, political ads and in the halls of Congress, more Republicans are echoing former President Donald J. Trump, arguing that increased migration at the southern border is an “invasion.” President Biden, under pressure from both Republicans and Democrats to resolve problems at the border, signed an executive order this month to restrict asylum, and could see more action next week.
The measure expected to be signed by Gov. Jeff Landry, Republican of Louisiana, includes provisions allowing Mr. Landry and his attorney general to establish a pact with Texas to address border security. Landry has already met with Gov. Greg Abbott, R-Texas, and dispatched Louisiana Army National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border.
Valarie Hodges, the Louisiana state senator who wrote the legislation, joined other Republicans in calling Biden’s recent action “too little, too late,” saying in an interview that state measures like hers were essential because the government Biden has failed to enforce immigration laws.
“The federal government is not helping us,” she said. “They did the opposite – they opened the doors and let more people in.”
In the swing state of Arizona, Republican lawmakers this month put a Texas-style measure on the ballot in November after their state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed similar legislation. And in Michigan, another battleground where immigration has deeply energized Trump’s base, Republican state lawmakers from the far-right Freedom Caucus introduced yet another measure.
James DeSana, a state representative in Michigan, said he and other authors of the bill decided to introduce it after a visit to Del Rio and Eagle Pass, Texas, although they believe it will likely stall in the Democratic-controlled state legislature.
DeSana, a Republican who campaigned against “sanctuary” cities when he won his seat — and wrenched it from Democratic control — in 2022, emphasized that he was not against legal immigration or creating more temporary legal pathways for workers to enter the country. But he was firm in his opinion that the situation on the southern border had become an invasion.
“A lot of people end up in inner cities,” he said in an interview. “We don’t have enough housing. Our police resources are overstretched. Crimes are being committed.”
Democrats, immigrant rights groups and some legal experts said the proposals could devastate their states’ economies, lead to racial and ethnic profiling and promote dangerous views of undocumented immigrants as hostile invaders and aliens. The Arizona ballot measure stirred memories of police harassment and anti-immigrant sentiment among young Latinos and immigrant rights activists who once successfully resisted such restrictive immigration laws.
On the Louisiana House floor in April, state Sen. Royce Duplessis, a Democrat from New Orleans, urged lawmakers in his state and across the country to reject language that encouraged images of undocumented immigrants as “even though they’re coming from space sidereal to take us all out of our homes.
In an interview, he said states with fewer resources would likely fare no better than the federal government in handling immigration, a complex issue that both parties have failed to resolve for years. “This is pushing an ideological agenda more than it is addressing real public safety issues,” he said.
Texas has experimented with expanding the limits of its powers on controversial issues other than immigration, including abortion and restrictions on gender transition, but its campaign has gained momentum on immigration.
Abbott’s transport of migrants to blue cities like New York and Chicago initially drew condemnation from immigrant rights groups and progressives, who argued that he was treating migrants as political pawns — and then concern, including among Democrats, that that local and state governments were not equipped to handle record levels of migration under the Biden administration.
Supporters of state measures argue that a 1996 federal law to restrict illegal immigration has improved the ability of states to help enforce immigration, even when the power to regulate immigration and naturalization rests with Congress. But efforts to expand law enforcement powers to implement immigration laws in the following decades were largely constrained by the courts. Federal judges blocked key aspects of immigration laws adopted in Arizona in 2010 and South Carolina in 2011, including provisions that required law enforcement agents to check the immigration status of some people at routine stops and that immigrants carry federal registration documents.
More recently, in committee hearings and floor debates, Republicans have stressed that their descriptions of a southern border raid are accurate, pointing to the flow of fentanyl across the border and instances of human trafficking, murders and assaults. sexual acts committed by undocumented immigrants.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the vast majority of fentanyl in the United States is smuggled through legal ports of entry, typically by citizens crossing the border, and although the country’s immigrant population has been growing for decades, crime in the same period decreased.
In the Texas case before the federal appeals court, Ilya Somin, a professor at the Antonin Scalia School of Law at George Mason University in Virginia, argued in an amicus brief on behalf of himself and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, that the Expanding the definition of invasion to include illegal immigration would set a dangerous precedent, allowing states to declare war on foreign powers whenever they wished, and would lead to the detention of more people without due process, regardless of citizenship.
“This goes against the text and the original meaning of the Constitution” and will have dire implications, Somin said in an interview.
Jennifer M. Chacón, a Stanford Law School professor who researches immigration and constitutional law, said the rhetoric in the Texas case, stirring fears of immigrant invasions, has emerged throughout the country’s history, playing on harmful racial and ethnic tropes and intolerance.
“An invasion envisages an armed group acting cohesively to enact an act of war and deserves a response. That’s not it,” she said, referring to the increase in immigration around the world. “This is a multinational group of men, women and children who are fleeing for various reasons.”
