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Texas House Wants Life in Prison for Immigrants, Vigilante Border Force [1]
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Date: 2023-03-13
From the Texas Tribune (an excellent source for news related to the state, by the way):
Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan threw his support behind a striking border security bill that would create a state unit of officers empowered to “repel” and arrest migrants crossing the border outside a port of entry and return migrants to Mexico if they were seen trying to illegally cross the border.
Prison terms, including, under some circumstances, life sentence:
The Senate bill, proposed by Sen. Brian Birdwell, R-Granbury, would jail a person for a year or two years if the person tried to enter the country a second time. The proposal would also punish the person to life in prison if they had been previously convicted of a felony.
And a vigilante force of civilians:
The bill also says the unit chief could employ civilians who have not been convicted of a felony “to participate in unit operations and functions,
Now, I live very near the border, and the crisis is real. Drug trafficking is real. Human smuggling is real. The refugee camps in Mexico, some of them a few yards from the border, are a humanitarian tragedy. And the Biden administration really doesn’t seem to be prioritizing this. They need to start, for everyone’s sake (including their own political future).
But still, proposals like this (and the suggestions from some Texas politicians that the U.S. basically invade Mexico) are just crazy. And frightening. And dangerous. I’m not saying that we’re anywhere close to mass violence and pogroms now, but stirring up this kind of hatred definitely moves us a step or two down that path.
As an aside, much was made of Republican gains among Latinos in south Texas. I’ll leave it to others to debate the causes of the shift and how worried we should be. But I can assure everyone of one thing: Anyone who assumes that U.S.-born Latinos are likely to have greater empathy for immigrants because of a shared cultural/linguistic heritage or family members who were immigrants themselves is making a huge mistake.
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