Vanessa Cárdenas: “Allowing the Texas ‘show me your papers’ law to proceed is an invitation to cruelty and chaos that threatens to violate the civil rights of both immigrant communities and U.S. citizens alike“
Washington, DC — The following is a statement from Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, reacting to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to allow the Texas SB4 immigration law to go into effect while the 5th circuit considers the law’s legality:
“Allowing the Texas ‘show me your papers’ law to proceed is an invitation to cruelty and chaos that threatens to target and violate the civil rights of both immigrant communities and U.S. citizens alike. SB4 will empower vigilantes and turbocharge the relentless anti-immigrant scapegoating that has been central to the political strategy of Texas Republicans, including Governor Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton. It empowers law-enforcement at all levels of government to go after anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, even if they have the expressed permission of the United States to be in the country. Meanwhile, it moves us farther away from seriously addressing 21st-century migration and reforming a broken immigration system.
Today’s ruling is a disturbing, if unsurprising, lens at the current U.S. Supreme Court. By allowing SB4 to go into effect, the Court gives legitimacy to the right-wing anti-immigrant judicial pipeline and a tacit endorsement to the dangerous ‘invasion’ clause Texas relied on. We fear the Supreme Court is opening the door to a continued weakening of the federal government’s supremacy on immigration and the frightening prospect of a dangerous and chaotic era of state anti-immigrant policymaking, driven by politics and not the Constitution. If we have fifty state immigration laws, can we really still call ourselves the “United” States?”
The earlier preliminary injunction against Texas’s SB4 from Judge David Ezra of Austin, Texas had it right, noting: ‘Surges in immigration do not constitute an ‘invasion’ … to allow TX to permanently supersede federal directives on the basis of an invasion would amount to nullification of federal law & authority—a notion that is antithetical to the Constitution.’”
