San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Dispute threatens to sink GOP immigration bills in final days
With days left in a special legislative session, Republican state lawmakers were at odds last week over a key part of their signature immigration bill that would empower police to arrest people they suspect of unlawfully entering Texas from Mexico.
The dispute, over whether to jail migrants or attempt to deport them, threatened to sink a centerpiece of Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security agenda for the monthlong session, which ends Tuesday.
Lawmakers also have yet to approve the governor’s request for an additional $1.5 billion to continue building a state-funded border wall, as GOP senators have openly questioned whether the governor’s multibilliondollar border crackdown is worth the expense.
“We have more people crossing the border today than we did when we started,” state Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, said in a hearing on the wall spending bill. “I don’t know that additional funding being spent as it currently is is going to do us any difference.”
Even amid those concerns, Perry’s Senate GOP colleagues are pushing a version of the “illegal entry” bill that calls for jailing every migrant arrested, to the “extent feasible” — an option that House Republicans say would be overly expensive.
But Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Republican Senate leader who largely decides the fate of legislation in the upper chamber, slammed the House’s plan for police to drop migrants off at ports of entry and order them to leave the country as “a Texassized catch-and-release bill.”
“The House version of HB4 does not require proper identification of suspects, fingerprints, or a background check and allows illegal border crossers to return whenever they want, time and time again,” Patrick wrote on social media. “Even if returned to the border, this policy would allow unidentified hardened criminals and terrorists to slip through the cracks and cross the border over and over again.”
House Speaker Dade Phelan fired back at Patrick, calling the Senate version “economically reckless” and a “long-term, state-funded hospitality program for illegal immigrants.”
The lieutenant governor’s remarks are “a transparent attempt to deflect from his chamber’s own impotent response to the growing crisis at our border,” Phelan, R-Beaumont, said in a statement.
State budget officials punted on trying to estimate how much the Senate draft of House Bill 4 would cost, writing that “the demand for state correctional resources cannot be determined due to a lack of data.”
State Rep. David Spiller, the Jacksboro Republican who authored the bill, said he would push to keep the House’s removal provision in the final draft, calling the bill “a work in progress.”
“There are some components of the Texas House’s version of the bill — specifically being the authority to order the removal of aliens arriving here illegally — that I feel need to remain in the bill,” Spiller said in a statement last week.
Spiller has said he worked with Abbott’s office to craft the bill. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
The bill cleared the House on Oct. 26 on a party-line vote after several hours of fierce objections from Democrats, who argued that it could have dangerous consequences for the state’s growing population of immigrants. They said it would sow widespread distrust between law enforcement and people of color, lead to racial profiling and perhaps even cause the errant removal of citizens who happened to leave their proof of ID at home.
Under either chamber’s version, HB 4 would further escalate Texas’ effort to crack down on immigration across its 1,254mile border with Mexico. Abbott already has led an unprecedented scale-up of the state’s border policies through his wide-ranging border crackdown known as Operation Lone Star, which lawmakers have funded to the tune of $10 billion.
Supporters say the effort, which began in the opening months of the Biden administration, is necessary to fill the gaps left by the Democratic president’s immigration policies. Abbott and other Republicans repeatedly have blamed Biden for a historic surge of migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Legal experts have said similar proposals to HB 4 seemed designed to challenge a key Supreme Court ruling that essentially held that only the federal government has the power to enforce immigration laws. State Sen. Brian Birdwell, the Granbury Republican who drafted the Senate’s overhauled version of HB 4, said he struck the removal provision over that very concern.
“This revolving door of illegal immigrants into the country is not sound policy, but it was also a breach of the 10th Amendment preclusion on states to not perform the duties expressly given to the federal government,” Birdwell said.
Legal experts said Birdwell’s draft still hits the legal snag he hoped to avoid, under a section that would require judges to order the offender’s removal from the country once their sentence is up.
“Changing it from state deportation in lieu of arrest to state deportation after conviction does not make it any less unconstitutional,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director for the advocacy group American Immigration Council, wrote on social media last week.
The wall funding bill also was stagnating ahead of Tuesday’s end-of-session deadline. Both chambers have passed their own versions of a bill devoting $1.5 billion to erect more miles of steel bollards along parts of the border in South Texas, but neither one has received a hearing needed to advance it to the floor.
The Senate version includes an extra $40 million for the Department of Public Safety’s border security operations, including “additional overtime expenses and costs due to an increased law enforcement presence” in Colony Ridge, a sprawling development northeast of Houston that is home to many low-income and immigrant families.
Abbott asked lawmakers to investigate the community after right-wing news outlets spent months casting it as a hotbed of cartel activity and peddling other anti-immigrant conspiracies. Residents and top state law enforcement officials say the claims are baseless.
Phelan complained Thursday that the House’s wall funding bill had “inexplicably stalled in the Senate for over a week,” though the upper chamber passed a nearly identical version two days earlier. On Wednesday, the speaker adjourned the House until early this week without signaling plans to take up the Senate’s wall funding bill.
The bill was expected to sail through the Republican-controlled Legislature before it got swept up in the feuding between Patrick and Phelan. Even Republicans who voiced skepticism about the $1.5 billion price tag ended up voting for the bill.
“I am, too, concerned that we’re spending a whole lot of money to give the appearance of doing something rather than taking the problem on to actually solve it. And until we do that, I don’t expect to see much happen,” state Sen. Bob Hall, REdgewood, said before voting to advance the bill out of committee.
Abbott’s office has identified more than 800 miles where “some kind of barrier may be necessary.” An official with the Texas Facilities Commission, the agency overseeing the wall project, said its contractors had built about 12 miles of wall so far, at a rate of $25 million to $30 million per mile.
“That’s a lot of money to get 800 miles of wall,” Hall said.