Immigration, Justice

Injunction Stops Texas 'Show Me Your Papers' Law: 'Cause It's Unconstitutional, Not Just Post-Harvey Cruel

The Constitution continues to stop the racists, but for how long?

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There are three things we know about all of these laws pushed by the Alt-Right against sanctuary cities:

  • They’re racist and cruel
  • They make things harder for the police
  • They’re unconstitutional

The first two points are incontrovertible. These laws are aimed at harassing and intimidating brown people. Cops are not going to ask a red-haired woman with a thick brogue to produce her immigration papers. Nobody is going to hold a low-level meth dealer in lock-up until ICE shows up because he said: “What’s this all aboot, eh?” when he was pulled over. No, the government is trying to harass a specific group of people based only on the color of their skin. If you don’t see the inherent racism behind these laws, you need to open your blue eyes.

The leaders of “whites only” America are so hell-bent on pushing them through, that they’re ignoring the advice of their usual shock troops, the American police. Police forces in every major city in this country will tell you that attaching immigration enforcement to their responsibilities will make their jobs harder and more dangerous. If you are a state trooper and you pull someone over for speeding, you want that person to think “damn, I’m going to get a ticket.” Not, “oh no, I’m going to get deported to a country I don’t ever remember living in, GUN IT, JEFE! We’re gonna outrun the pig or die trying.” Cops do not want to be Jeff Sessions’s agents of racial separatism.

But the third point is more open-ended because the Constitution is largely silent on the issue of cultural tyranny. I think that these laws are unconstitutional, but there are a lot of people who think that the Constitution is a fundamentally racist document that is therefore entirely compatible with racial profiling.

People who believe the Constitution is a better than the people who wrote it received a victory, yesterday.

District Judge Orlando L. Garcia issued a temporary injunction blocking implementation of Texas’s SB4, a “show me your papers” law that would do a whole host of things to officials in so-called “sanctuary cities.” (Garcia is from Texas. I HATE THAT I HAVE TO POINT THAT OUT, but I know how you f**king Trump people think.)

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SB4 was a racist mess, and Judge Garcia’s order blocks most of it from taking effect for now. Coincidentally, the law was supposed to take effect on September 1. Garcia’s ruling doesn’t have anything to do with the flood, but the cruelty of directing law enforcement to focus on checking immigration status while people are drowning, dodging toxic gas clouds, and trying to find new homes is lost on NO ONE.

SB4 deputized officers to check immigration status even during routing traffic stops, and prescribed harsh penalties for anybody who “materially limits” immigration enforcement. Do you know what “materially limits” means? Yeah, neither did the judge; Garcia struck that as unconstitutionally vague.

One of the dumbest parts of SB4 is that it told local officials that they could not “adopt, enforce or endorse” any limitations on immigration enforcement. My friends, THERE is your attack on the First Amendment, and once again, it’s got nothing to do with Millennials on college campuses or Antifa. This LAW here purports to tell elected officials what they can “endorse.”

Garcia was having none of that. From the New York Times:

“The government may disagree with certain viewpoints, but they cannot ban them just because they are inconsistent with the view that the government seeks to promote,” Judge Garcia wrote. He added, “SB 4 clearly targets and seeks to punish speakers based on their viewpoint on local immigration enforcement policy.”

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You’d think Texas Governor Greg Abbott would be too busy furiously Googling “zoning regulations” as he tries to figure out why the fourth largest city in the country is underwater, but no, he’s still got time for the race war he’s trying to start.

“U.S. Supreme Court precedent for laws similar to Texas’ law are firmly on our side,” Mr. Abbott said in a statement. “This decision will be appealed immediately and I am confident Texas’ law will be found constitutional and ultimately be upheld.”

If appealed, the case will go to the Fifth Circuit… which… sigh… look, Mandingo fighting is still probably legal in the Fifth Circuit. So after the Fifth reverses we’ll get to see if the Supreme Court wants to take the case.

But by then, the Supreme Court might have another sanctuary city case on its hands. Philadelphia has now joined cities like San Francisco and Chicago and is suing the Sessions Justice Department over its sanctuary city regulations. Those are the ones that allows Sessions to withhold police funding from sanctuary cities unless they agree to force their local police to do the bidding of federal ICE agents.

Whether or not the Justice Department is allowed to extort sanctuary cities into doing what it wants is, still, an open question. You’d think that the “federalists” on the court would be against this kind of behavior, but federalists sometimes lose their nerve when the only victims are brown.

As usual, overt racism towards Latinos seems like a weird hill for Republicans to die on. Sure, you can cause divisions within the community between people who have “status” and people who are undocumented, if your goal is to divide an conquer. But when you pass laws saying that any Latino can be harassed, it just feels like a battle you are going to lose in the long term.

Right now, the Courts are helping Republicans by blocking these laws. They get to say that they want them, which makes the white people happy, but we don’t yet have to suffer the full effects of these policies, which keeps everybody else from rioting in the streets.

But I don’t how much longer the courts can keep it up. Fifth Circuit is up next. God help us all.

Federal Judge Blocks Texas’ Ban on ‘Sanctuary Cities’ [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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