Stopping SB 4’s Green Light for Racial Profiling in Texas
By Angie Junck, Supervising Attorney
As a lawyer committed to the work of fewer, and ideally no, deportations, today is marked by both sadness and hope.
Today is the first day that SB 4, a racist law that seeks to further criminalize communities of color and strong-arm Texas law enforcement into fueling deportations against their will, goes into partial effect. A number of its troubling provisions were blocked from implementation by an injunction granted Wednesday through the Western District Court of Texas.
This injunction is a victory for Texans and for our movement — but our fight continues. The provisions which go into effect today encourage and allow for racial profiling by law enforcement; these cannot be ignored or forgotten.
And so today is also a day to recognize and recommit to the groundswell of resistance by Texans that SB 4’s passage has both fueled and reawakened.
I’ve had the immense privilege of partnering alongside dedicated community members, fellow lawyers, organizers, advocates, elected officials, and even members of law enforcement as they’ve remained steadfast and unwavering in their refusal to allow hate to shape the future of the state they know and love.
From packed courtrooms and city council meetings to impassioned testimony after testimony in Austin’s state capitol, I’ve come to know a lesser-known but fiercely progressive Texas, one that is driven by welcoming, by opportunity and by a strong sense of that famous Lone Star pride.
Whether under this or prior administrations, I know that SB 4 is not a departure from business as usual. It is simply a higher-visibility confirmation of a phenomenon that has been slowly and silently picking up speed since the 1980s — an attempt to legislate the United States back to whiteness by shamelessly and dangerously encouraging the exclusion of and violence against people of color, trans and queer people, poor people, immigrants, and countless others.
The passage of Prop 187, an anti-immigrant law in California rooted in similar principles of exclusion, spurred my own journey into immigration advocacy.
Like Prop 187 and Arizona’s SB 1070, SB 4 is racism dressed up in the guise of public policy, a ruse that would have you believe that a great Texas is a white Texas and others need not be welcome.
While the implementation of many harmful provisions in SB 4 is stalled, the fight is not over. We know the state of Texas is appealing the SB 4 injunction. We know that Texas is still ground zero for immigration enforcement and is a national leader in deportations. Governor Abbott and the Trump Administration will continue to target Texas’ immigrant communities in any way they can, ignoring our Constitution at all steps along the way.
But we have the power and opportunity to continue to fight back.
Every injustice we have triumphed against at the state level began from the demands of a local campaign. As we seek clarity on how we can confront the deep hate that pervades the systems that govern us, we must learn from resistance efforts of the past.
To defeat not only SB 4, but the sinister political agenda and cold heartedness that lies at its root, we have no choice but to continue the slow and steady work that we know best: organizing to build power and to shift the tides in our local communities towards inclusion and fair treatment until the waves are strong enough to shape a new shoreline.
This means we have to be varied in our tools and multidimensional in our approach to winning, for hate operates through many lenses:
We must win in our city and county councils by holding our elected officials accountable to community realities over the political status quo;
We must win in our jails by moving away from our over-reliance on incarceration. This means eliminating biased policing, decriminalizing certain offenses, diverting people out of the criminal system and into rehabilitation, ending the practice of jailing people simply because they cannot afford bail, and diminishing double punishment for immigrants behind bars;
We must win in our criminal courtrooms by pressing prosecutors to use their discretion to consider the immigration consequences of criminal cases, by providing tangible resources for criminal defenders to adequately defend their immigrant clients, and by ensuring judges give immigrants a fair shot in court.
We must win in our immigration courtrooms by committing to a future in which no child or adult is left to defend themselves alone in court;
We must win in our district courts by applying the fullest protections of the U.S. Constitution and its intent of fair treatment against hate-fueled public policy;
We must win in the Texas state legislature by showing up, literally and figuratively, for our values each of the many times they are placed on the chopping block;
We must win in our local newspapers, keepers of the court of public opinion, by adding the diversity of our voices and values in print;
We must win in our friendships and our relationships by speaking up against intolerance, even when our voice shakes, by refusing to perpetuate stereotypes or scapegoating, no matter how trivial, and by leading by example in using our words to scratch out the line between “us” and “them;”
We must win in our communities and our partnerships by elevating local and directly affected voices before our own; and most importantly,
We must win in our imaginations by remaining steadfast to our vision of a healthy and diverse Texas that thrives because of, and not in spite of, its explicit commitment to inclusion.
No matter how high the tide of hate, we must and we will win.
And we’re winning already: a number of localities across the state are actively discussing and beginning to reconsider their role in deportations. Eleven cities and six counties in Texas have publicly opposed SB 4. Earlier this year, after a hard-fought campaign, we saw the end of 287(g) in Harris County, the national birthplace of the program.
So let’s not let the clouds of this day silence us.
May they instead inspire us to be even bolder, consistently louder and forever unapologetic in our work to keep Texan families together and Texas communities whole.
To learn how you can join the fight against SB 4 in your city or county, check out our local policy options resource: https://www.ilrc.org/local-options-protecting-texas-immigrants-their-families
