2023-12-19 06:40:11
Civil rights groups have already said they will file a lawsuit. (ARCHIVE)
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the controversial SB4 law on Monday, which will allow state and local police to detain immigrants believed to be in the state illegally and gives state judges the power to order them to return. to Mexico.
Abbott signed the law at an event in Brownsville, Texas. It is scheduled to take effect in early 2024, although civil rights groups have already said they will file a lawsuit and the law will most likely end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Under this law, illegal entry from a foreign country will become a state crime; That means that the Texas government will be able to charge immigrants with a class B misdemeanor, which punishable by up to six months in prison or a $2,000 fine. The penalty could be increased to a state jail felony if the defendant has any prior convictions for the same crime. At the same time, the law allows state justice to order the expulsion of people without judicial process.
This is the most restrictive law for migrants ever passed in the United States, allowing police to arrest people only on suspicion of their immigration status, warned the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which He told Abbott that “cruelty towards migrants is not a political solution”.
SB4 “violates critical constitutional provisions about the federal government’s role in defining immigration priorities, and states’ limitations on interfering with those priorities and with the domestic and international relations of the United States,” he recently told EFE David Donatti, ACLU lawyer in Texas.
Abbott also signed a separate bill, known as Senate Bill 3, allocating $1.54 billion in funding for the state to continue building a state border wall similar to one built under former President Donald Trump. , the Dallas Morning News reported.
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