AUSTIN, Texas - Civil rights attorney Roberto Lopez does not expect the Biden Administration to come to the aid of immigrants arrested under the sweeping new powers Senate Bill 4 bestows on law enforcement.
Lopez, a Rio Grande Valley native, is the beyond borders senior advocacy manager at the Texas Civil Rights Project. TCRP works to defend the civil and human rights of border communities and of those migrating through the borderlands.
Lopez spoke about the likely impact SB 4 will have in Texas during a recent webinar hosted by America’s Voice and Congressman Joaquin Castro of San Antonio.
“Two years ago, we filed a complaint with the Department of Justice. We have continued to provide supplemental complaints on all the abuses that we're documenting. We have several probable cause affidavits that are wrong, where DPS officers said that they knew someone was an alien because of how they smelled. And the federal government has not responded to that. The Biden administration is not going to come to our rescue,” Lopez said.
If that is the case, what can immigrant families do? Lopez said he and other civil rights leaders will be there to help.
"What we're going to be doing now is working with our community, helping ensure that everybody knows their rights, documenting abuses from police as they take on these immense and incredible new powers,” Lopez said.
“And we will be fighting tirelessly as these bills come into effect in the next few months to just make sure that everybody knows what this legislation does, how they can respond to law enforcement when they're pulled over. And we will be doing our best to document and fight this in court as best we can.”
On the webinar, Lopez gave his analysis of Senate Bill 4.
“SB 4 will subject millions of people across the entirety of Texas to racial profiling. And that is not some sort of exaggeration. This bill is not limited to the border. It is not limited to immigrants who have recently crossed (the border). This allows any officer in the entire state of Texas with a gun at their hip, to detain and arrest someone who they suspect of being here without papers.”
Lopez said there is no clarity from the authors of the legislation on how it should be applied. He said dozens of amendments were filed to try to clarify the meaning of the legislation, to give officers guidance on how to implement SB 4. “All of those (amendments) were just swept aside,” Lopez said.
Lopez said what this tells Texans is that the state is not making good public policy. “This is all political theater.”
The federal government itself makes mistakes when it comes to applying federal immigration enforcement, Lopez said.
“In the last several years, hundreds of U.S. citizens have been wrongfully arrested. Dozens of U.S. citizens have been deported wrongfully. And we've had US citizens detained in ICE facilities for months and receiving hundreds of thousands (of dollars) in relief or damages their databases, access to other consulates, access to different resources that they have at their disposal across multiple agencies in the Department of Homeland Security. Texas does not have that.”
Lopez said what Texas is doing with SB 4 is telling every police officer to become an immigration expert overnight. “This law will subject millions to racial profiling. It will fuel fear and discrimination and further marginalize our vulnerable populations."
Lopez said what Texas is doing through SB 4 is creating an entirely new immigration scheme.
“We have a separation of powers because we want our United States government to act with one voice. We do not want every state to have its own separate Criminal Code on who gets punished or who's welcomed into the country. We have a whole system of checks and balances and separations of powers for this purpose.”
Lopez then ran through the things the Texas Legislature has not done.
“They have not tried to fix the problem of processing in at its international bridges, not fix visa backlogs, not work on any of the real challenges that we have with our immigration system.” Instead, he said, they have “just criminalized people to kingdom come.”
Lopez also spoke about some of the other pieces of legislation the Texas Legislature has passed on the issue, including funding to the Governor’s Office for Operation Lone Star.
“Six point six billion dollar at this point has been appropriated in the Texas legislature for border security operations. We've passed bills to criminalize and sentenced people to ten years mandatory minimum if they're convicted of human smuggling. We now have these bills of criminalizing improper entry, codifying federal immigration enforcement at the state level and making Operation Lone Star indefinite in Texas,” Lopez said.
“Operation Lone Star has been the cause of human rights abuses on the border where we've had mothers of immigrant children have miscarriages on the river because they're not being treated properly. We've had people who've been arrested on trespassing charges under Operation Lone Star in Texas prisons for months on end without seeing an attorney, without seeing sunlight and that is what Texas wants to codify.”
