HUNDREDS OF TEXANS converged on the capital this week to oppose a new state-led security force that would enlist civilians to track and capture undocumented people.
In a hearing that stretched into the wee hours of the morning Wednesday, the Texas House of Representatives heard testimony from first-generation college students, undocumented activists, parents, and children about the inherent dangers of House Bill 20. The author of the controversial proposal, Republican Rep. Matt Schaefer, meanwhile, was grilled by his Democratic counterparts over his bill’s logical and constitutional implications.
In his most extensive public defense of his bill to date, Schaefer, the founder and chair of the arch-conservative Texas Freedom Caucus, collapsed the issues of fentanyl overdoses and migration, ignoring facts and evidence to argue that migrants are responsible for a wave of death and suffering that exceeds the worst episodes of national trauma in modern American history. Pointing to national overdose statistics, he described “a scale of death far greater than Pearl Harbor, the attacks on 9⁄11, or the totality of the Vietnam War.”
“So much fentanyl is coming across the border, it’s unreal,” the Texas lawmaker said before proceeding to conflate and misrepresent several issues regarding migration and drugs.
As federal officials, border researchers, and journalists have documented ad nauseam, most fentanyl illegally trafficked into the United States comes through U.S. ports of entry, often in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens; according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data cited in Wednesday’s hearing, 86 percent of defendants convicted of smuggling fentanyl through ports of entry are U.S. citizens.
Migrants, on the other hand, overwhelmingly cross the border between ports of entry, thanks to successive bipartisan policies that have made admission at the ports — including pursuit of asylum claims — all but impossible. Customs officers who work the ports where most of the drugs are crossing are distinct from the Border Patrol agents who work between them, undermining a central argument Schaefer made that Mexican organized crime uses migrants to pull away U.S. officials who would otherwise be intercepting drug flows.
“Many of them are coming here just for a better life and make wonderful neighbors,” Schaefer said of the migrants themselves, but “some of them are criminals — rapists, gang members, MS-13.” To address the threat, Schaefer has proposed the “Border Protection Unit,” a new security force composed of law enforcement personnel and private individuals alike, answering directly to the governor in a mission to “arrest, detain, and deter individuals crossing the border.”Read the full story here: https://theintercept.com/2023/04/14/hundreds-turn-out-to-denounce-texas-republicans-vigilante-death-squads-policy/