by Marlissa Collier
A few weeks ago, on Palm Sunday, a Sunday ironically commemorating the arrival of Christ to Jerusalem – mere days before his arrest on Holy Thursday for suspected crimes and his crucifixion on Good Friday – hundreds of protesters paraded into Dallas to make one thing clear: they were in opposition of Senate Bill 4, the controversial Texas immigration law that would empower state and local law enforcement to arrest any individual suspected of entering the United States illegally. The Palm Sunday march was organized and held by a coalition of local civil rights organizations called DFW for Immigration Rights. Drawn from all corners of the Lone State to what’s become known as “the buckle of the Bible Belt,” protestors marched through the streets of downtown Dallas chanting in perfect cadence, “say it loud, say it clear: Immigrants are welcome here.”
The Palm Sunday march though was just the latest in growing statewide resistance to the Texas law that has given onlookers a bout of whiplash in recent weeks. The law has been a point of contention between the Biden Administration and Texas Governor Greg Abbott for months now, both of whom have watched countless court battles over which level of government has the jurisdiction and power to enforce border and immigration policy. The Biden Administration argues that border policy and immigration law is above the paygrade of state government, and that the setting and enforcement of such policy has always been and should remain a federal task. Governor Abbott, on the other hand, argues that Texas has the right to protect its border and that he, as the state’s top official, has the right and duty to set policy that he believes provides said protections. This basic power-struggle has led to judges and justices as high as the Supreme Court needing to weigh in to help solve the debate. In the past month alone, the law has been tossed around from being okayed for enforcement to being placed on-hold as the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect just hours before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed course, upholding a lower court judgment that ruled the law Unconstitutional. The law is currently not in effect in Texas as the 5th Circuit Court reviews yet another appeal.
Early version of SB 4, authored by Senator Charles Perry in 2017, seeking to prohibit sanctuary cities.
But Senate Bill 4 made its way to the Texas legislative scene long before its passing during a special session in November 2023. Senator Charles Perry, a Republican state congressman from Lubbock authored the bill in the Texas Senate, stating that the bill was meant to “prohibit sanctuary city policies that prohibit local law enforcement from inquiring about a person’s immigration status and complying with detainer requests.” The original bill, which was passed through the Texas Senate in 2017, sought to strip state funding from local and state entities and college campuses that failed to enforce immigration laws and cooperate with immigration officials. The bill also sought to enforce fines on local governments whose law enforcement agencies failed or refused to turn detained immigrants over to federal immigration officers.
While the text of the bill has been through several iterations since 2017, the final law captured and accomplished the essence of Senator Perry’s original bill. SB 4 punishes any law enforcement entity that attempts to “prohibit” or “limit a person who is a commissioned peace officer” from “inquiring into the immigration status of a person” if said officer believes that an individual entered Texas through Mexico illegally. In other words, the bill allows local and state law enforcement to stop, inquire, arrest, and detain anywho who is suspected of illegal entry into Texas by way of the U.S./Mexico border. Now being compared to the Ohio native “stop and frisk” tactic that stepped onto the law enforcement scene in the 1960s, allowing officers to stop, question, frisk and briefly detain individuals based on “reasonable suspicion” rather than “probable cause”, SB 4, like stop and frisk is left to be enforced based on each peace officer’s respective lens of suspicion.
Final SB 4 text outlining the prohibition of discrimination
Because of this, officer relativity is being called into question. The absence of universal standards as to what characteristics make an individual “suspicious” of having crossed the border illegally is where the danger lies. Not only does the bill challenge the balance of power that has historically been held between state and federal governments, but it does so in a state that has the fastest growing population of Latinos in the US, making brown people who look “suspicious” ripe for picking. Though the bill does include a clause prohibiting discrimination during the enforcement of the law, said clause is blatantly contradictory as nowhere in the bill are means provided by which law enforcement personnel can determine “suspicion.” In a statement released by Unidos US, the largest Latino civil rights organization in the US, it was noted that SB 4 sought to “upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos,’ not only for Hispanics—who make up more than 40% of the state’s population—but for businesses, neighborhoods, and communities all over Texas.” The statement released by Unidos U.S. also blasted the passing of the bill, warning that it would mean the subjection of “Latinos and their families to discrimination at the hands of Texas law enforcement”.
Texas Senator Royce West seemed to share the same sentiment. In a strongly worded statement released just after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Texas law enforcement agencies were allowed to enforce SB 4 – a ruling that would be short lived, as hours later a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that deemed the bill Unconstitutional, effecting halting the bill once again – West questioned the “factors that could amount to reasonable suspicion”. “Could it be the color of a person’s skin, the language they speak, or the communities where they live or are passing through?” In Senator West’s district, the potential trouble that could be caused by enforcement of SB 4 and its non-existing standards of defining “suspicion” is in perfect relationship with what could unfold across Texas as a whole. With just under 40% of West’s District 23 identifying as Hispanic as recently as 2022, Senator West could have actual problems on his hands. From the upending of community trust with law enforcement and the depression of immigrant buying power, to the deterrence of workers, businesses, organizations and tourists. West, in his statement, also called out his fellow Texas Congresspeople who voted in favor of SB 4, blasting them for the correlation between their voting in favor of the bill and their refusal to take time to include language that would clarify “how police could determine probable cause or reasonable suspicion”.
SB 4 is currently on hold as an appeals court considers whether the bill is constitutional and if Texas actually has the authority to set and implement immigration and border policy, a task that has generally been reserved for the Federal government. Still, SB 4 threatens to conjure the ways of law enforcement’s origins. Before the United States had police, there was the slave patrol. The slave patrol’s underlying purpose was to ingrain the fear of escape and to curb the threat of uprising through the systemic pursuing and detaining of blacks who were “suspected” of being runaways. And because slavery was an institution that was built on the separation of human beings based on skin color, anyone with black skin could be and was often considered “suspicious”. SB 4 is reminiscent of that same slave patrol, who, we can imagine, spent a good portion of the day roaming around asking any Black person they considered “suspicious” to “show me your papers.”