NEWS: Congressman Greg Casar on Texas Legislature’s Attacks on Immigrants

WASHINGTON – Today, Congressman Greg Casar (D-Texas) released the following statement on the Texas House’s passage of multiple anti-immigration bills this week.

“Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature continue to target our immigrant brothers and sisters, neighbors, and friends with vile, unconstitutional, anti-immigration bills,” said Greg Casar (D-Texas). “They have dumped billions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of government hours into keeping our immigration system broken — all to score political points against President Biden. 

“This latest slate of bills will lead to racial profiling and to the separation of U.S. citizens from their non-citizen family members. Abbott’s plan is to cast blame on immigrants and terrorize families, rather than actually address the real problems Texans face. We need to address the humanitarian challenges at our border head on, and chart a new path for a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system — not spew hate and division.” 

The slate of anti-immigrant bills: 

• Senate Bill 4, passed by both chambers and facing one more procedural vote before it goes to Greg Abbott’s desk, would continue to ramp up criminal penalties related to migration, without proposing any solutions for legal migration, work permits, or humanitarian support for those feeling violence or disaster.
• House Bill 4, passed by the Texas House and sent to the Senate, would create a new state crime for illegally entering Texas from Mexico, empowers any officer to detain any person in any part of Texas, and would lead to racial profiling and separation of families. It is the new “Show Me Your Papers” bill. 
• House Bill 6, passed by the Texas House and sent to the Senate, would appropriate $1.5 billion (on top of the billions already spent) to fund additional border barriers along different parts of the 1,200-mile Texas-Mexico border. This could include river buoys or razor wire, which have already killed and injured people migrating to Texas.  

In Congress, Casar is a co-lead of the New Way Forward Act (H.R. 2374), which would end the harmful practice of local and state police acting as deportation agents and would target the unconstitutional Operation Lone Star.

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Congressman Greg Casar represents Texas’s 35th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives, which runs down I-35 from East Austin to Hays County to the West Side of San Antonio.  A labor organizer and son of Mexican immigrants, Casar serves as the Whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus for the 118th Congress. He also serves on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the Committee on Agriculture.