Texas’s immigration law has been put on hold

The Up First Project: A Five-Year Investigation into a Cover-Up of a Mississippi Sheriff’s Detached Black Hole

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The bill would allow state and local police officers to arrest people suspected of being in the country illegally, and it would allow judges to order the deportation of migrants to ports of entry along Texas’s border with Mexico, regardless of which country the migrant is from.

Six former Mississippi police officers will be punished this week for torturing two black men in an attack that lasted more than two hours. The “Goon Squad” was made up of the officers. They raided a home last January, shot one of the men and planted drugs and a gun at the scene to cover it up. U.S. District Judge Tom Lee sentenced former sheriff’s deputy Hunter Elward yesterday to 20 years in prison and former lieutenant Jeffrey Middleton, who devised the group’s cover-up plan, to 17.5 years in prison. (via Mississippi Public Broadcasting)

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The Biden administration maintains that immigration policy and law enforcement are exclusive functions of the federal government, despite the fact that Texas overstepped its constitutional limits with its pass of Senate Bill 4.

A legal back-and-forth over whether the bill should take effect while a court considers the merits of the law created chaos on Tuesday.

The bill was originally set to go into effect on March 5. But the U.S. government and the ACLU both filed lawsuits against it, and a district judge issued a preliminary injunction to block the law from enforcement while the case was being heard.

At the hearing, a three-judge panel questioned the Texas solicitor general about details of the law and heard arguments from the U.S. Department of Justice and the ACLU about why it should be struck down.

The Texas solicitor general said that it’s important, because it helps address what the president has called a border crisis.

The question of whether to allow the district judge’s preliminary injunction to take effect was one of many that the Fifth Circuit discussed on Wednesday.

Critics of SB 4 have cast the law as Texas’ attempt to take over those law enforcement capabilities, a notion that Nielson disputed at Wednesday’s hearing. He told the panel that it was not true. “What Texas wants to do is to be able to coordinate with the federal government.”

Federal attorneys, meanwhile, have repeatedly pointed to a 2012 Supreme Court decision known as Arizona vs. United States, a case about a state law in Arizona that sought to create state-level crimes for immigration offenses and empower local law enforcement to check citizenship status and arrest people suspected of being in the country illegally. In a 5-3 decision, the court sided with the federal government and struck down most of Arizona’s law.

Groups that advocate for civil rights and immigrants’ rights have criticized the law over concerns that it could lead to racial profiling. SB 4 would allow law enforcement officers to question someone’s immigration status for any reason.

“We know that this law is going to increase racial profiling. We are aware that the law will strip people of their rights. “We know that the law will result in a mass criminalization of our communities,” says Alan Lizarraga, a spokesman for the Border Network for Human Rights.

If a migrants comes to face state charges, they could have their federal cases complicated by the Texas law which requires proof of prior state criminal charges in order to get asylum.

Mexico also disagrees with the law. The foreign affairs ministry made it clear that the country will not accept immigrants who have been deported. Mexican nationals in Texas could now be subject to discrimination and hate and it was worried about that.

With the case back at the Fifth Circuit, Mexico said it plans to file a legal brief in opposition to SB 4 that lays out how the law could affect the relationship between the two countries, the statement said.

Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carillo: A case study of the state’s enforcement of the border state immigration revocation law

Law enforcement officers say that they will enforce the law. Others said that they had not received clear guidance about how to implement it, or whether they’ll have the funds to carry out large numbers of arrests.

“I think we’re going to be very selective about the cases we pick up,” said Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carillo, whose jurisdiction is located along the west Texas border. He told the Texas Newsroom on Tuesday that he’s had to have a talk with his county attorney about the possibility of charging any illegal immigrants with a crime.

Wednesday’s appeals court hearing revealed the extent to which the details of the law’s enforcement are still not known. Nielson, the Texas solicitor general, struggled to answer a series of questions from Chief Judge Priscilla Richman about how various scenarios would play out.

When Richman asked how the law would be applied to a person who entered the U.S. illegally from another border state before moving to Texas, Nielson replied, “I don’t know.”