Senate passes anti-Asian hate bill
WASHINGTON — Legislation aimed at quelling a rise in antiAsian hate crimes during the coronavirus pandemic easily passed the U.S. Senate on Thursday, with both of Texas’ Republican senators backing the Democratic bill.
The nearly unanimous vote comes as the number of hate crimes Asian Americans reported nationally skyrocketed over the last year, with Texans reporting the fourth-most in the nation in 2020, according to one recent study. The bill would create a position at the Justice Department to oversee prosecution of hate crimes related to the pandemic and expand avenues to report such incidents.
Even U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz — who was one of just six senators to vote against advancing the legislation in
a procedural vote earlier this month — supported it on Thursday. U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, cast the lone dissenting vote.
A Pew Research Center survey this week found a third of Asian Americans fear someone might threaten or physically attack them. Incidents reported in 2020 included racial slurs and people spitting on them or coughing on them.
“These unprovoked, random attacks and incidents are happening in supermarkets, on our streets and takeout restaurants — basically wherever we are,” said U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat who authored the legislation. “These disturbing and horrifying attacks are in many ways a foreseeable and predictable consequence of the use of racist and inflammatory language, like the Chinese virus or kung flu, to describe the pandemic.”
Texas incidents
Stop AAPI Hate, a group tracking hate crimes against Asian Americans, received reports of 3,795 such incidents from March 2020 through the end of February. The vast majority of those reports came from California and New York, but the group received 103 reports from Texas, the fourth-most behind Washington.
The Texas incidents included a report from a Dallas mall in which a woman coughed and told a Pacific Islander, “You and your people are the reason why we have corona.” She then said, “Go sail a boat back to your island.” In another incident, a group of white males yelled a racial slur and then spit at someone in College Station.
The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, found hate crimes against Asian Americans nationally surged by nearly 150 percent last year, even as reports of hate crimes overall dropped 7 percent. That study, which tracked incidents in the nation’s largest cities, reported three such incidents in Houston and six in Dallas in 2020, up from zero in each city the year before.
Hirono, who was the first Asian American woman elected to the Senate, said the reported incidents are likely only a small subset of what Asian Americans face, as hate incidents are historically underreported.
While officials in the Houston area reported no increase in hate crimes targeting Asian Americans by last month, community leaders have said Anti-Asian American sentiment has soared during the pandemic, describing stories of online attacks, racist remarks and verbal harassment. National incidents, including horrific attacks against Asian American seniors in San Francisco and New York, have stoked fear as well, they have said.
After a gunman killed eight people in three Atlanta-area spas, six of them Asian women, the Houston Police Department and Harris County Sheriff ’s Office increased patrols in Asian American neighborhoods.
The legislation, deemed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, now heads to the Democratic controlled House, where it is expected to pass with ease. President Joe Biden has said he will sign it.
The bill sets up new staterun hate crime hotlines and offers grants for law enforcement agencies to train officers to identify hate crimes. It also requires the Justice Department to issue guidance for state and local law enforcement agencies on how to establish online hate crime reporting processes in multiple languages and how to expand culturally competent education campaigns.
Cruz amendment nixed
Before the final vote, Democrats rejected an amendment Cruz offered focused on anti-Asian bias in college admissions, which Republicans have pointed to as they oppose affirmative action policies.
Democrats called it a “transparent and cynical attack” on policies that courts have repeatedly upheld. It was one of a handful of Republican amendments they rejected before passing the bill.
Hirono, who led debate against the amendment, said Cruz’s amendment sought to undermine efforts “to increase diversity and provide opportunities to students of color.” Hirono said it would threaten funding to colleges using race-based admissions policies that have been upheld by courts repeatedly.
“Despite their calls to end racism, it is clear Democrats are only paying lip service to fighting discrimination against Asian Americans and will allow targeted discrimination against them to continue at America’s universities and colleges,” Cruz said in a statement.
Cruz’s effort came as the Biden administration dropped a Trump-era Department of Justice lawsuit against Yale University, which alleged the college was discriminating against Asian American and white applicants.
The Trump administration had also supported a separate lawsuit with similar allegations against Harvard University, which has made its way to the Supreme Court, though justices have yet to say whether they will take it up.
That lawsuit is backed by Edward Blum, a Texan who has spent years fighting affirmative action in court, including through a failed lawsuit against the University of Texas at Austin. The Supreme Court upheld racebased admissions in that case in 2016.