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UPDATE (March 20, 2024, 10:54 a.m. ET): Hours after the Supreme Court allowed SB 4 to go into effect, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Texas from enforcing the law while the court considers its legality.
The Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that allows Texas to enforce a law that lets state law enforcement officers arrest people suspected of being in the United States illegally.
The move followed Monday’s brief stay extension from the justices that prevented the law from going into effect. Tuesday’s ruling allows Texas to enforce the law, known as Senate Bill 4 or SB 4, while its legality is under consideration by the ultraconservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Fundamentally, this is a gift to the state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott — and, potentially, other ultraconservative officials who have peddled bogus claims that a warlike “invasion” of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border mandates that Texas assume immigration enforcement duties that are traditionally assigned to federal officials.
The law is likely to subject many nonwhite Texans to racial profiling, since officers will now be authorized to question and investigate people according to their perceived citizenship status.
The law is likely to subject many nonwhite Texans to racial profiling, since officers will now be authorized to question and investigate people according to their perceived citizenship status. That’s precisely what happened with Senate Bill 1070, an Arizona law that the Supreme Court ruled largely unconstitutional in 2012.
That law terrorized scores of Arizonans and, in some cases, motivated Latino activists to get more involved in liberal politics. Rep. Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat now running for the U.S. Senate, as well as former Arizona Democratic Party Chair Raquel Terán (who’s running for the congressional seat Gallego is vacating), used the organizing tactics they learned while demonstrating against SB 1070 to help turn the state from red to purple.
That’s just one of the reasons — along with the resulting protests, boycotts and expensive lawsuits that plagued Arizona — why I predicted Abbott may come to regret SB 4.
Texas Republicans effectively have gotten what they wanted: a green light to target people who appear, by state law enforcement officers’ reasoning, to be in the U.S. illegally. But this is a be-careful-what-you-ask-for situation: Tuesday’s ruling makes it likely that Texas will soon face mass demonstrations and other backlash against what is inarguably the harshest immigration law in the country.