Cities take Texas to court over immigration, sanctuary cities law

Rick Jervis | USA TODAY

AUSTIN – First, the small border city of El Cenizo sued their state of Texas. Next, El Paso County filed its lawsuit.

Then, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas joined in. And now Houston, the most populous city in Texas, is also considering suing the Lone Star State.

The subject of all the legal action: Senate Bill 4 (SB4), the recently-passed law that challenges sanctuary cities. The growing list of cities and municipalities, aided by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and the ACLU, claim the law, passed last month, is unconstitutional and threatens public safety.

SB4, signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on Facebook Live on May 7, requires local law enforcement agents to honor requests by federal immigration agents to detain jailed immigrants suspected of being in the country without proper documentation. It also empowers local law enforcement officers to ask about a person’s immigration status during routine encounters, such as traffic stops.

Texas joins at least 33 other states that also considered laws this year to crack down on “sanctuary cities” — nearly double the number from 2016.

The move by Texas follows President Trump's executive order on immigration, issued in January, which threatened to withhold some federal funds from communities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. A San Francisco federal judge in April blocked the executive order. Last month, the Trump administration narrowed the executive order’s scope and asked the judge to reconsider.

Local officials say the state shouldn’t be compelled to enforce federal immigration law. The new Texas law, they say, erodes trust between local law enforcement and immigrant communities.

“We want our day in court,” Austin Mayor Steve Adler said at a press conference last week announcing the lawsuit. “For far too long, the legislature has been playing political football with the safety of our city and other cities in Texas. Now, we get to move to a different forum.”

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of recent developments that highlight a deepening discord between Abbott, the state’s Republican leadership and Texas’ metro centers, which tend to be majority Democratic.

Speaking to a group of Republicans last week in Benton, about 60 miles north of Austin, Abbott criticized Travis County officials and its county seat of Austin, which is heavily-Democratic and Abbott's residence as the state capital.

“As you leave Austin and start heading north, you start feeling different,” Abbott told the audience, according to the Austin American-Statesman. “Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different. And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. It’s the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas.”

Also last week, Abbott called lawmakers back to Austin for a special session that would address issues such as restrictions on property tax growth and a bill regulating which bathrooms transgender people should use – a move local leaders across Texas criticized as overreach because some of the bills would override local laws.

“While Abbott and some conservative Republicans talk a lot about federal government overreach, the special session agenda is nothing more than big government at play, and it goes against the very spirit that defines Texas — individuality,” the American-Statesman argued in an editorial on Friday.

Read more:

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Justice Department warns 9 'sanctuary' jurisdictions they may lose funding

Conflicts between cities and state leaders have happened before but rarely to the pitch it’s reached in recent days, said Mark Jones, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston. Other states, such as Illinois and Missouri, are red-leaning states with strong Democratic cities, but Texas’ sheer size and the size of its ever-growing cities amplify the growing chasm between the two, he said.

“We’ve seen a trend over the past 10 years where Republicans in state government have moved to the right, where the cities, due to demographic transformations, have become more liberal,” Jones said. “The gap between the two has grown and continues to grow.”

JoAnn Fleming, executive director of Grassroots America, a Tyler, Tex.,-based conservative activist group, said Abbott and state lawmakers are doing exactly what she and the other Republicans voted them in to do.

Filing a lawsuit against the state because local municipalities don’t wish to abide by federal law is wrong and should be fought, said Fleming, who supports SB4. “The law-and-order residents are going to push back,” she said. “And we’re going to lean hard on elected officials to do the right thing.”

Contributing: Alan Gomez