Much of what the Trump administration is doing today has been tried by several states through the years. In 2013, Arizona and Alabama passed what many referred to as a “Show me your papers” law, which the Supreme Court mostly struck down. Florida recently passed SB 1718, granting local and state law enforcement the ability to enforce immigration law and charge migrants with trafficking. All of which serve as examples of states employing legislation based on racial profiling to target Latinos under the guise of immigration enforcement.
Meanwhile, Texas employed its own measures under Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who acted unilaterally in launching these attacks on immigrants and costing the state billions of dollars, and not achieving much. Texas Rep. Troy Nehls had a policy of racially profiling Latinos as Fort Bend County Sheriff before entering Congress. Texas has been at the forefront of the Trump administration’s mass deportation machine since Trump left office after his first term.
The architect of those policies is none other than Ken Cuccinelli, who served as acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for two years under Trump during his first term. Cucinelli had a private meeting with Abbott about enacting emergency measures and declaring states of emergency, followed by releasing a letter in 2021 co-signed by Russ Vought, the current Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The letter laid the groundwork for what would become Operation Lone Star, employing the manpower of the Texas National Guard and the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to target Latinos.
“We call on Gov. Abbott and other border governors to enact emergency measures–beyond the scope of what has been undertaken to this point–to fill the void by: ending the invasion at the U.S. southern border, restoring both order and sovereignty, and protecting their citizens,” reads the 2021 letter.
Everything from trying to charge migrants with trespassing, which prevented them from being deported because of pending charges, to building more border wall and striking fear in many rural Texas border communities, the operation has cost Texas $10 billion so far and resulted in state law enforcement simply turning people over to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for standard processing. Essentially, state officials were in Border Patrol’s way, leaving them to hand migrants over to CBP for processing under federal law.
It was, and still is, theater. Propaganda driven by fearmongering, disinformation, and outright hate. An agenda that gained a fever pitch after the 2020 census revealed that Latinos were 40% of the population in Texas compared to 39% of white people. The racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory has been a staple in rural and suburban Texas ever since. Suburban racist White folks have been some of the biggest drivers of hate toward Latinos, right alongside the broad animus for Black people. It’s especially prevalent on the Nextdoor app.
For Texans, it came as no surprise that 24% of all migrants detained were apprehended in the state, according to recent reporting. While Chicago, Washington D.C., and Los Angeles get most of the attention thanks to the violence attributed to federal agents from various agencies, in Texas, they operate a little more aggressively than they did before the current Trump administration, but they do so much more covertly and with the help of local and state law enforcement.
This has been the case for years in Texas. It highlights just how easily people can go back to ignoring what ICE does if they were to tone it down to how they’re operating in Texas. Getting into a car accident, calling the police for help, or a simple traffic stop can get a Latino entangled with ICE because city leadership lied to the public and declared they would not be working with ICE. Instead, agents have been waiting in the wings for calls from cops so they can appear seemingly out of thin air to harass Latinos.
Seeing what’s happening in other cities that the White House declared war on is horrifying and leaves many to speak out about everything ICE is doing. Meanwhile, ICE is operating with impunity in states like Texas and Florida and destroying communities, families, and businesses, and it hardly gets a mention. After the recent reporting exposing just how much of a problem it is, the focus remains on other cities and states.
In those cities, the state-sanctioned violence invokes thoughts of authoritarian, oppressive regimes elsewhere in the world. In many ways, federal agents’ actions are worse than those of many dictatorships. What’s happening today is undeniably horrifying, but we can not let it become normalized like it has been in Texas, where we stop talking about it. Even if ICE tones it down, being more covert doesn’t mean they’re not doing what we’re seeing in many cities today.
Like DHS, ICE is an inherently violent agency. Whether you see them or not.
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