Texas will soon allow law enforcement to arrest and deport migrants if Governor Abbott, as expected, signs a border bill that is heading to his desk after heated debate in the Texas legislature. 

The measure is heavily opposed by civil rights groups, who say immigration and deportation are the federal government’s purview and that the bills are racist.

SB 4, one of several immigration bills considered in a special legislative session called by Mr. Abbott, would criminalize illegal border crossings and allow Texas to remove illegal immigrants. The legislature also voted for a bill to appropriate $1.5 billion in border security funding. 

“The Texas House has made critical progress on border security agenda items for Special Session #4,” Mr. Abbott wrote on X after the legislation passed in the House on Tuesday evening. “Texas won’t wait on [President] Biden to secure the border.” 

The passing of the border bills in the legislature is a major win for the governor, who has long tried to empower the state to handle a border security crisis he says the federal government has failed to address. As the Sun has reported, his efforts have drawn both heated criticism and rampant support in a debate over whether immigration issues are solely within the federal government’s purview. 

“It’s not all right to be racist,” a state representative, Jolanda Jones, said of the border bill. “I will stop pulling the race card when you stop being racist,” she said. 

The bills fuel “racial profiling and harassment,” the executive director at the ACLU of Texas, Oni Blair, said in a statement. “Texas politicians have pushed through some of the most radical anti-immigrant bills ever passed by any state. If signed into law, these bills will directly harm people seeking asylum, Black and Brown communities, and the core principles of our democracy.” 

The ACLU is “not backing down,” she said, adding that if Mr. Abbott signs the bill into law, “we will sue.” 

The crux of the constitutional debate stems from a 2012 Supreme Court case, Arizona v. United States, in which the court held that Arizona could not criminalize entering the state illegally or deport those individuals, ruling that those policies were within the federal government’s scope.

“No matter what a left-wing judiciary has said in the past decade,” the bills coming out of Texas are “entirely constitutional,” the Texas Public Policy Foundation chief of intelligence and research, Joshua Treviño, tells the Sun. SB 4 “falls under the plenary powers the states have over all persons within their jurisdiction under the Tenth Amendment,” he adds.

“Ultimately, the only power reserved to the federal government vis-a-vis migration is making citizens — states can’t do that, that’s explicitly in the Constitution,” Mr. Treviño says. 

Democratic-led city and state governments believe they are sovereign on migration policing and enforcement when it comes to sanctuary cities, but will argue against border security bills in Texas, he says. 

“They’re in favor of governments that they control being fully in power to do what they wish, but governments that they do not suddenly must be constrained to a, frankly, extra-constitutional degree,” Mr. Treviño says. “That’s just the nature of the left with which we live.”