AUSTIN, Texas — A Texas Senate committee will take up two border security bills on Thursday morning that will ramp up a permanent Texas law enforcement presence on the border and steeply increase the penalties for those who attempt to smuggle migrants into the country.
House Bill 7 and House Bill 800 both passed the House on party-line votes last week. These are big bills with even bigger price tags, possibly costing up to $1.5 billion a year in incarceration costs alone, according to an analysis done by immigration advocates. It’s hard to know the actual price because the fiscal note on House Bill 7, which will create a variety of border protection programs, doesn’t include the cost of a Border Protection Unit. And the cost of House Bill 800, which ramps up smuggling penalties, has no estimated cost in its fiscal note.
Plenty of witnesses at a House hearing on the bills — especially those on the border who have dealt with the disruption caused by unchecked migration — liked these solutions. They are also the only solutions Republicans have proposed, and Gov. Greg Abbott has said a law enforcement presence on the southern border is necessary, especially with the end of one of the state’s strongest tools to deport migrants, Title 42.
“With the ending of Title 42 on Thursday, President Biden is laying down the welcome mat to people across the entire world, but Texas is deploying our new Texas Tactical Border Force,” Abbott said in a statement on Friday. “The Texas National Guard is loading Blackhawk helicopters and C-130s and deploying specially trained soldiers for the Texas Tactical Border Force, who will be deployed to hotspots all along the border to help intercept and repel large groups of migrants trying to enter Texas illegally.”
Texas’ current effort to assist federal border agents, Operation Lone Star, cost well over $1 billion in the last two years. But it’s an operation staffed by volunteers who rotate to and from the border, making it unsustainable in the long term. Hence, the current proposal of a permanent border law enforcement force, possibly with its own dedicated court system, once the two bills are amended in the Senate.
Immigration advocates say the picture Abbott paints of the Texas-Mexico border, as a lawless land of limitless migration, heartless human smuggling and an alarming influx of deadly fentanyl is deceptive. Betty Camargo of Border Network for Human Rights, a border resident, doesn’t pull any punches. The state’s border presence, she maintains, has militarized what should be viewed as a humanitarian issue, allowing the rise of racist and xenophobic rhetoric.
“Governor Abbott has worked tirelessly to paint a distorted, fabricated and erroneous narrative of our safe and secure border communities,” Camargo told reporters on a conference call Wednesday. “His blatant and constant attacks against migrants and refugees has led the state of Texas to a shameful and dangerous situation where Texan values of humanity, compassion and welcoming are being stomped by white supremacy, xenophobia and hate.”
Nor is the picture of foreign nationals smuggling hundreds of migrants into Texas the full picture of the border issue, said Attorney Fatima Menendez of MALDEF. Some of those detained for smuggling are gullible teenage kids who have been paid to offer a simple car ride. Proposed guidelines would allow a court to sentence those kids to a minimum 10-year prison sentence. There’s also the question of the border unit’s powers, Menendez said.
“Border Protection Unit officers would not be federal immigration offers, and they cannot act as such,” Menendez said. “You would have these officers who would be authorized to arrest, apprehend, detain and remove persons that may have legitimate asylum claims before those individuals are even able to speak with a federal immigration officer that has the proper training to process someone seeking asylum.”
Texas, and the nation, has a humanitarian crisis because federal lawmakers have failed to fix a broken system, Camargo said. That’s compounded by ill-conceived policies that do more to put migrants in a permanent holding pattern rather than dealing with asylum cases.
Texas Impact, a broad coalition of social justice clergy, also pushes back on Abbott conflating the number of immigrants with the recovery of fentanyl. According to the governor’s latest update, Operation Lone Star has apprehended 373,000 migrants and recovered 402 million lethal doses of fentanyl. It’s not migrants bringing in fentanyl, however, said Bee Moorhead, the director of Texas Impact.
“To tie these two together is beyond cynical and exhibits a callous disregard for the genuine sorrow of those who have lost family members to fentanyl overdoses,” Moorhead said. “The Cato Institute did a report a year or two ago that found that over 90% of fentanyl seizures occur at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints. And that .02% of people arrested by border patrol for crossing illegally had any fentanyl.”
Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid has represented thousands of cases against asylum seekers, said Attorney Kristen Etter. Not a single client of TRLA has ever been charged with possession or distribution of fentanyl.
“It’s so easy for the governor to say (fentanyl is being seized) because everybody is afraid of fentanyl. I am a mom. I have a teenage daughter,” Etter said. “That is a very terrifying aspect of the border that is completely unlinked to the border migrant crisis.”
Camargo has her own suggestions on how to actually address the border crisis in a permanent way. Congress should overhaul immigration laws and create welcome centers for lawful entry, a place where migrants could begin an orderly process for migration or enroll in a guest worker program. It would also free up border agents to pursue actual criminal activity on the border.
“We need to start seeing the migrant as a human being and not what it’s being portrayed as, a criminal or this invasion rhetoric that we keep hearing,” Camargo said. “The truth is, we’re the new Ellis Island. And, for us, this is a collaboration between state, federal and our community.”