Abbott signs law making illegal immigration a state crime in Texas

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill Monday making illegal immigration a state crime in a bid to give police and National Guard troops more power to fight the surge of illegal immigrants that has swamped the state since the start of the Biden administration.

The Republican governor signed another bill allocating $1.5 billion to build more border wall, moving to complete the fencing started by President Trump but halted by President Biden.

“Biden’s deliberate inaction has left Texas to fend for itself,” Mr. Abbott said as he inked the bills at a ceremony along the border wall in Brownsville, at the southern tip of Texas.

He justified the state’s action by citing a section of the U.S. Constitution that gives states the power to repel an invasion if the federal government doesn’t act.

Those who back stiffer border security hailed the governor’s stance as a needed antidote to Mr. Biden’s lackluster approach.

“If we would have the strength of will, like what Gov. Abbott has shown, with all of the governors on our southwest border, this problem would go away tomorrow,” said Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council. “These steps that a governor is taking, rather than the president of the United States, is going to save thousands upon thousands of lives.”

Immigrant rights groups fretted that the new law with state penalties for illegal immigration would lead to racial profiling of state residents.

Mr. Abbott said he expects the law to be used chiefly by police who watch people sneak across the border.

Congress is struggling to negotiate a package that would include tighter immigration controls along with billions of dollars in aid that Mr. Biden is seeking for Israel and Ukraine.

The moves add to Mr. Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which deployed state law enforcement to the border, built 16 miles of wall and laid 110 miles of razor wire, and bused more than 80,000 migrants to sanctuary cities across the country.

The laws raise a host of touchy legal questions, testing the ability of a state to occupy immigration policy ground that the federal government controls.

Those challenges are certain to arise. For now, though, Mr. Abbott’s signature stands as a political challenge to a Biden administration, which is struggling to figure out the border mess without resorting to the get-tough measures that worked for the Trump administration and that Mr. Biden denounced in the 2020 campaign.

Texans’ frustration with the crush of illegal immigrants is shared around the country, most notably by Democratic politicians in New York, the destination for many of the migrants.

New York Mayor Eric Adams said Sunday that his city residents are “angry” about the Biden administration’s failures.

“People are realizing this is unfair to cities across America,” said Mr. Adams, who has calculated that taking care of the migrants will cost $11 billion over three years and will force cuts to services for the city’s other residents.

New York and other cities have pleaded for more cash to help care for the unauthorized migrants.

Texas’ approach — to try to do what it can to stop the flow of people — is fraught with legal complications.

The state statute makes illegal immigration a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. That is equivalent to federal law, which also carries a maximum six-month penalty.

Texas is also adopting an illegal reentry law that carries a stiffer penalty. That, too, is similar to federal law.

In reality, federal officials rarely bring criminal prosecutions and instead use the civil immigration law to deal with border jumpers. The immigration courts, which hear the civil cases, are so backlogged that migrants make bogus asylum claims, knowing they will potentially get years of freedom living in the U.S. while their cases wind their way through the process.

The Trump administration attempted to increase prosecutions in 2018 with its “zero tolerance” border policy. The problem was that the federal criminal justice system had no place to hold children. When parents were charged, their children were siphoned off into the foster care system with no concrete plans to reunite them.

Those family separations proved so horrific that the Trump administration canceled the policy after just a few weeks.

Texas’ new law attempts to create a pseudo-deportation system, allowing state judges to order illegal immigrants’ departure. If they fail to leave, they may be charged with a crime.

The law prohibits enforcement in schools, places of worship and medical facilities.

Police in Texas use the state’s trespassing law against illegal immigrants when they are found on private property. Thousands of prosecutions have been brought.

Still, making a state crime specifically about illegal immigration could trample on Congress’ power.

“We believe that these pieces of legislation are unconstitutional, an overreach of state power and a violation of federal law,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, chief external affairs officer at RAICES, which provides legal services to immigrants in Texas.

Mr. Al-Juburi said Texas will now be “an even more hostile state for immigrants, regardless of status.” He said he hopes the Justice Department attempts to stop the state policy.

That would not be surprising. The Justice Department is already battling Texas on several fronts over immigration.

One case challenges the floating border wall Texas erected along a small stretch of the Rio Grande. The federal government won the first go-around in district court, but the matter is now before an appeals court.

Texas, meanwhile, has sued to try to stop the federal government from cutting through the razor wire that the state piled up along the riverbank of parts of the Rio Grande.

A federal district judge ruled for the Biden administration, saying there wasn’t a specific policy the state could challenge, though she accused federal officials of causing the migrant problem.

In addition to the illegal entry and wall-building laws, Mr. Abbott signed a third bill Monday that creates mandatory sentences of 10 years for someone convicted of migrant smuggling and five years for someone convicted of operating a stash house to hold illegal immigrants.

Mr. Abbott said too many Texans are being enticed to sign up with the Mexican cartels to smuggle people deeper into the U.S.