But Californians should pay attention to what is happening in Texas with legislation that would allow all police officers to deport undocumented immigrants. This legislation would embolden Texan police officers to deport people who they suspect are in the U.S. without legal documentation. These anti-immigrant policies are not new concepts to us in California. In the 1990s, then-Gov. Wilson passed Prop. 187, which attempted to repudiate social services to undocumented immigrants. And Arizona’s SB 1070 was a law that would’ve allowed police officers to verify one’s immigration status if they suspected a person was undocumented.
These particular laws have the same goal: to keep immigrants out of the U.S. They have another goal – to strip away rights from Latinos, to other us, and criminalize our presence even if we are U.S. citizens.
What makes the Texas law worse than what happened in Arizona and California is the presumption of guilt associated with someone for simply looking “suspicious.”