Opponents both domestic and abroad have come out in full force against Texas’s latest immigration law, which gives local judges the authority to deport immigrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
The law, which was signed by Governor Greg Abbott on Monday, is the amalgamation of Texas Senate Bill 3 and Texas Senate Bill 4. The first-of-its-kind policy appropriates $1.5 billion in border funding and effectively makes crossing the Texas-Mexico border a state crime, creating a new state misdemeanor for immigrants who enter or reenter the state illegally, with violations of the new crimes punishable by up to two years. The law also gives local and state police the authority to arrest immigrants who they suspect of having unlawfully crossed into the state, as opposed to federal agencies.
On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the state in an effort to block the state-specific anti-immigration effort, arguing that the bill is unconstitutional and defies federal immigration law, according to the lawsuit.
“Governor Abbott’s efforts to circumvent the federal immigration system and deny people the right to due process is not only unconstitutional, but also dangerously prone to error, and will disproportionately harm Black and Brown people regardless of their immigration status,” Anand Balakrishnan, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU, said in a statement.
Abbott has responded that the state is willing to take that lawsuit all the way up to the Supreme Court if necessary, reported Politico.
But they weren’t the only ones angered by the state’s creeping regulations. The nation’s southern neighbor also came out in fierce opposition to the newly minted law, promising to file a formal challenge.
“The foreign ministry is already working on the process to challenge this law,” Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Tuesday, according to Reuters.