Texas' S.B. 4 Is Worse Than You Think
“The chaos is its own damage.”
BY TAMARA SHAMIR
APRIL 21, 20247:00 PM
When I met Ira in January, her top priority was getting out of Texas before S.B. 4, a new state law that authorizes state forces to take over immigration enforcement, took effect.
Ira currently has a few months remaining on a one-year parole—a legal status that offers temporary authorization to live in the United States—and is working on her asylum application to defend her and her children against deportation. She told me she had escaped Mexico after she took a bullet in her abdomen protecting her daughter from a cartel shooting. Yet Ira, resolute and deeply competent, could not figure out how to leave Texas. She said her savings were drained by the medical bills from the shooting and the journey to the United States. (Slate is not identifying her by her full name because her asylum case is ongoing.)
“If you don’t have a job, you don’t have a shot [leaving]; without a work permit, you don’t have a shot at a decent job,” she told me. It costs $410 to apply for a work permit in the United States.
Ira is afraid that if she and her six children—three of them her own, three her partner’s—do not make it out of the state before S.B. 4 is fully implemented, she could be jailed or deported, even though she has a temporary status and a strong asylum claim. “When you’re Mexican, people think you’re illegal,” she told me. (I’ve translated her interviews from Spanish.) “They won’t stop you,” she paused, pointedly—I’m a white naturalized citizen—“you have the face of an American, the speech, everything. But imagine me! I follow the law, but they can stop me because I look illegal.”
More:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/sb4-texas-immigration-law-worse-than-you-think.html
