Carson Bonner, Campus Carrier news editor

A new Texas bill known as Senate Bill 4  has been blocked by a federal appeals court and caused controversy, as it would expand the power of the local and state police by allowing them to arrest suspected undocumented immigrants. The U.S. Justice Department has sued Texas over the law, arguing that the state-level immigration policy is unconstitutional as it oversteps into the federal 
government’s authority. 

The proposed law signed by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott indicated the continued dissonance between Texas and federal lawmakers in relation to immigration, a topic that has been a cause of complaint with Abbott. Part of the concerns shared by the public is that the law would lead to blurred lines and too much of an expansion to the power of law enforcement.

“When you start talking about trying to transform law enforcement officers into border patrol agents, you’re running into a problem,” Associate Professor of Political Science Eric Sands said. “The whole mentality is different. It’s not quite as extreme as when they talk about using soldiers as a peacekeeping force but it’s similar, because that’s not what they are trained to do. So making sure that these migrants coming across the border are having their rights and their dignity respected.”

Southern and Southwestern states tend to experience the highest influx of undocumented immigrants illegally crossing their borders, with an estimated 1.8 million living in Texas and 340,000 in Georgia. According to Sands, this is the primary justification Abbott shared for the new law; he has shared in the past that Texas was left to fend for itself due to federal inaction.

“What we’ve got is a showdown between the Governor of Texas and the Biden administration,” Sands said. “This has been an issue since the beginning of Biden’s administration, a lack of enforcement of immigration laws. The border has been incredibly coarse under Biden’s law. We’ve had millions of illegal crossings in that time. The states in the south and southwest are the ones that bear the brunt of that.”

In Georgia, the recent murder of Laken Riley on the campus of the University of Georgia led to a call for increased restrictions in relation to illegal immigration. This included a bill being introduced during the General Assembly that would allow Georgia residents to sue and call for a judge to cut off state funding and remove elected officials of a county or city that was acting as a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. 

“As part of our ongoing commitment to protect Georgians, we are taking a stand against those who attempt to implement sanctuary policies that violate the law and harbor criminals,” Lt. Gov. Burt Jones said in a statement. 

According to senior José Reyes, a student in the Bonner scholarship program whose projects surrounded immigration and the Latino community, the term “illegal immigrant” dehumanizes immigrants who cross illegally and reduces them and their humanity to being illegal, rather than merely a person who committed an act that was illegal. This leads to continued discrimination and racial profiling. Reyes said that if the law were to pass, or a law of a similar kind that further criminalized illegal immigration, it would lead to increased discrimination against immigrants as a whole. 

“It would cause a lot of racial profiling,” Reyes said. “People could be arrested just because they look like what someone’s idea of an undocumented person is. Immigrants already experience racism and discrimination, but this would set them up to be constantly in fear of being persecuted, and would set up the Latino community to be in a position to experience more racism than we already deal with.”

For many undocumented immigrants and their children, pursuing higher education is not an option due to lack of documentation, education visas or funding. Public institutions cannot offer federal or state financial aid to undocumented students and also requires students to pay out of state tution, so many students who have the capability to pursue secondary education typically apply to private institutions and scholarships offered by those institutions. 

“A lot of the time, students who are undocumented don’t even consider higher education to be an option,” Reyes said. “They have the struggle of considering if it would be better to work to help their families achieve a better lifestyle, or the ‘American Dream,’ or if they should try to find means to achieve a college education. Many times they can feel a sense of duty to their parents and their families and feel as though they owe it to them to work in order to better the lives of their families.”

For immigrants who are protected by the immigration policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), there is the opportunity to apply every two years for protection from deportation and a permit to work in the United States. While DACA does not provide a pathway to citizenship, in most states students are able to attend college if they are DACA protected.

“DACA is good in some ways,” Sands said. “If you have DACA and you keep up with the renewal every two years then you can stay in the States and work and support your family. You can be protected from deportation unlike those who don’t have DACA status.”

Sophomore international student Cindy Fowks is from Costa Rica and wants to be able to live in the United States after college. According to Fowks, the process to even being approved to be an international student for four years of college was rigorous and required applications, testing and funding.She said that in comparison to Costa Rica, the attitude toward immigrants is troubling and causes a lot of stress in the United States.

“I definitely think there’s a lot of racism behind some of the immigration laws,” Fowks said. “It feels risky to be here especially for people who look like illegal immigrants or anything. Now it’s kind of scary, so I feel like I need to carry my passport to make sure that [the police] don’t think that I’m here illegally. Immigrants and people of color should not experience the discrimination and profiling that they do, and I hope that it can be fixed.”

While the Texas law has been blocked, there are still numerous laws that further the discrimination faced by immigrants and minorities as a whole, preventing many from pursuing means that would better their futures. As Texas legislators, as well as those in other states, continue to push for harsher immigration restrictions, it remains to be seen if the proposed laws will have their  desired effects.