Texas town leads charge against immigration crackdown
El Cenizo wants to block law requiring suspects to be held for possible deportation
EL CENIZO, Texas — This scrappy city of rickety homes on the U.S.-Mexico border cannot afford an ambulance or a gas pump. The mayor earns $100 a month. The nearest supermarket is a half-hour drive.
Yet El Cenizo is leading the charge to block a tough new Texas immigration law that requires police to hold criminal suspects for possible deportation, before the measure takes effect Sept. 1.
The lawsuit filed by the city pits Mayor Raul Reyes and his tiny outpost of Democrats against the state’s powerful Republican Party. Almost everyone in town is an immigrant from Mexico — or is related to one — and many are here illegally.
“People have been posting that they should make an example out of me and that they should lock me up,” Reyes , who helped draft the federal lawsuit, said in an interview at City Hall. “It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for this cause. I know I will be on the right side of history.”
The mayor’s move puts this city of 3,300 residents at the heart of a new war raging in Texas over an old issue: illegal immigration.
On one side is GOP Gov. Greg Abbott, and the Republican-led state legislature. Emboldened by President Donald Trump’s blunt rhetoric on illegal immigration, they passed a law in May that forces “sanctuary cities” such as El Cenizo to help detain and deport those who are in the country unlawfully. Uncooperative local governments face large fines, police chiefs and sheriffs could be jailed, and elected officials could lose their jobs.
On the other side are progressive activists such as Reyes, part of a fastgrowing younger generation that is largely Hispanic and U.S. born but lacks the political power of conservative white voters. With him are advocates who have pressured Dallas, Houston and other cities to resist cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement because they fear it will lead to racial profiling or deportations for minor offenses.
Tensions boiled over in Austin, Texas, on May 29, as protesters gathered outside the state capitol. Lawmakers nearly came to blows after a Republican from the Dallas area boasted to several Democratic colleagues of calling immigration authorities to come arrest demonstrators.
Rep. Matt Rinaldi, a Republican, said he made the call because some protesters held signs openly declaring their undocumented status. The Democrats say there were no such signs and accused Rinaldi of racial profiling. Democrats said that proved the anti-sanctuary city law will result in the unfair targeting of Latinos.
Appearing with Neil Cavuto on Fox News on Thursday, Rinaldi defended the law as simply keeping “criminal aliens — murderers, rapists, child abusers — from being shielded from federal authorities.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, Rinaldi called the sanctuary city law a “very strong policy” that “deals particularly with criminal aliens or illegals” responsible for thousands of crimes. The law forbids law enforcement authorities from racially profiling suspects, he said.
In a video on Facebook to announce that he had signed the law, Abbott singled out for criticism the sheriff of Travis County, which includes the liberal city of Austin, who won her seat last year promising not to honor requests from ICE to hold people in the local jail for federal immigration violations.
Reyes, El Cenizo’s 34-year-old mayor, has gotten mixed reactions from residents of this impoverished enclave on the humid banks of the Rio Grande. It sprung from a shantytown of landscapers, farmworkers and house cleaners who could not afford the rent in nearby Laredo, a bustling hub of 250,000 people about 17 miles to the north.
For down payments as small as $50, they bought plots of land and built trailers and, later, cinder-block houses. Some are patched together with duct tape, tarps and aluminum foil. “He’s trying to defend us,” said Maria Magdalena Rangel, a 72-year-old immigrant from Mexico who arrived at a church Thursday for a weekly ration of bread and tomatoes.