Pearl River As Trump II starts to fire up, the situation of immigrants is going to be front and center. In a surprise to some perhaps, the issue of the border, which has been a hot button for Texas’ governor in recent years, also brought almost all of the largely Hispanic Texas border counties into the Trump voting column. Soon we’ll see how much of the Trump talk can convert to action, but it’s not like the Biden-Harris program has been a soft berth for immigrants over the last year either. Workplace inspections are likely to come back again, but there will be business pushback on farms and lower waged plants, which might part the red wave on that front. There’s tough talk about the new administration using “military assets,” which is a sneaky euphemism for moving troops into domestic affairs, which is dangerously undemocratic and authoritarian. Former President Obama was the super-deporter among recent presidents, and Trump will want to beat his record, but mass deportations are still hard to imagine.
Talking recently to Cornell University Professor Shannon Gleeson on Wade’s World about the struggle for immigrant rights in Houston, where she was raised, and a town I know well, inadvertently shed some light on this situation. In the book she co-authored with CUNY Professor Els de Graauw, Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston, the back and forth between various levels of government in dealing with immigrants was a key issue. The City of Houston and its police force often had a different policy than Harris County, where Houston is centered, and both were often out of line with some of the initiatives of the state of Texas.
How to handle racial profiling of Hispanics is at the heart of this problem, both practically and politically. In the Houston area, that was an issue where mayors and police chiefs often butted heads, and where immigrant rights groups and the basic politics of the city prevented the police from routinely asking anyone anywhere about their citizenship status. The Maricopa County and Sheriff Joe Arpaio model was not the Houston model. A surprise election of a young, Latina reformer as sheriff of Harris County is proof positive of how fundamental this issue is. If Trump pushes dragnets against Hispanics, the more US citizens he catches in that net, the more Republicans can forget about moving that base to their party in future elections.
At the same time as immigrant rights groups and initiatives in Houston have been able to slow the anti-immigrant roll, they have also been hobbled by limited funding and support from the various levels of government. Business interests are powerful in the city and seemed to only step up when it came to supporting naturalization programs.
One win for undocumented immigrants came from the work of the Texas Organizing Project, the former Texas ACORN. Creatively, they were able to promote Houston library cards as a form of identification allowing immigrants some safety and access to services.
In the coming years, we’re going to need to celebrate every small win we can achieve as well as any boulder we can push into the road, as big victories, because there’s no doubt the government will be coming at full force for immigrants.