Open border

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently signed two bills into law designed to further harden the southern border. SB 3 provides $1.5 billion for additional wall building and to support more state law enforcement targeting of low-income immigrant neighborhoods, like Houston’s Colony Ridge. SB 4 gives local police the power to engage in immigration enforcement, including arresting people for not having the right citizenship papers and deporting people into Mexico, regardless of their country of origin. The bills, which Abbott signed into law on December 18, represent a dangerous and almost certainly unconstitutional expansion of police power, consistent with Abbott’s earlier interventions along the border, which have included dispatching the National Guard as part of Operation Lone Star, which directly contributed to drowning deaths on the Rio Grande border.