TX Observer: “SB 4, passed in November during a dysfunctional fourth special legislative session, grants unprecedented powers to local and state police, judges, and magistrates. For starters, the bill makes it a state misdemeanor crime for a non-U.S. citizen to improperly enter Texas from another country—say, by rafting across the Rio Grande from Mexico. To avoid prosecution, alleged crossers may agree to a judicial order to return to the country they came from; if prosecuted, they face up to six months in jail, after which they’ll be subject to an identical order anyway. Refusal to comply with these state deportation orders constitutes a separate felony offense.
The bill also makes it a crime to reenter or be “at any time found” in Texas after having previously been removed from the country under SB 4 or by the feds. The law’s language utterly ignores the fact that deportees can sometimes return legally to America. SB 4’s crimes can be enforced anywhere in the sprawling Lone Star State, where one in five residents is foreign-born, including months or years after a person arrives. Unlike other anti-immigrant laws in Texas and elsewhere, SB 4 does not prohibit racial profiling in enforcement. It also does not exempt people seeking asylum….
“What the Texas Legislature has passed is unprecedented in that it is a complete override of the federal government’s authority in immigration,” said Adriana Piñon, legal director of the ACLU of Texas, which has already announced it will sue the state over the law. “SB 4 is brazenly unconstitutional and flouts … well-established precedent.”
The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the feds’ peremptory power over immigration since at least 1876…”