States have ramped up efforts to enact stricter immigration laws, group finds

Efforts by state lawmakers across the U.S. to pass stricter immigration laws have increased significantly over the past four years under the Biden administration, according to a report released by a national civil rights group on Thursday.

The League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest Latino civil rights organization in the U.S., found that state lawmakers have proposed 233 laws that the group considers to be “anti-immigrant” — up from 132 in 2023, 64 in 2022, 81 in 2021 and 51 in 2020.

Those proposals include measures to criminalize unauthorized entry into the U.S. at the state level, curb so-called “sanctuary” policies that limit local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities and address concerns about noncitizen voting attempts, which studies show are rare. Other measures have sought to crack down on the hiring of undocumented workers. 

The report, first shared with CBS News, underscores how Republican state officials across the country have increasingly sought to challenge the federal government’s long-standing authority to set immigration and border policy.

The vast majority, or 97%, of these immigration measures proposed in state legislatures since 2020 have been sponsored by Republican lawmakers, according to LULAC’s researchers. Texas has led the way with 91 proposals to enact stricter immigration laws in the past four years, the report shows.

Most of these proposals have not been passed and enacted, the report found, but several states with Republican-led legislatures have succeeded in getting them across the finish line.

State immigration laws

Late last year, the Texas legislature passed an unprecedented law known as SB4 that empowered state officials to arrest, jail and prosecute migrants suspected of crossing into the U.S. unlawfully. It also allowed state judges to order suspected violators to return to Mexico in lieu of prosecution. At the request of the Biden administration, a federal judge ruled against the law, which remains blocked while Texas’ appeal is reviewed.

Following Texas’ footsteps, state governments in Iowa, Louisiana, Kansas and Oklahoma enacted immigration laws that were nearly identical to SB4. The measures have similarly faced legal challenges by the Justice Department. In November, Arizona voters will decide whether to make it a state crime for migrants to cross from Mexico outside of a legal entry point – a ballot measure created by state Republican lawmakers.

Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, signed one of the toughest state immigration laws in modern history. The law increased penalties for employers who hire unauthorized workers, invalidated driver’s licenses issued by other states to undocumented immigrants, directed state hospitals to collect immigration information on patients and created new crimes for transporting people without a legal immigration status into Florida.

Republican state leaders have said they’ve sought to play a larger role in shaping immigration policy-making due to the record levels of illegal crossings reported along the U.S. southern border in recent years. They have blamed President Biden’s policies for that record influx, denouncing them as too lax and lenient.

“Biden’s deliberate inaction has left Texas to fend for itself,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, said when he signed SB4.

LULAC, on the other hand, said the state measures are divisive and counterproductive. Some of them, the group argues, could also lead to racial bias against Latinos, since many undocumented immigrants hail from Latin America. 

“You really see activist governors and attorneys general that are basically trying to address these issues on their own, instead of, quite frankly, working in a bipartisan way through Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, for example, to provide a clear pathway for citizenship, to more clearly define what the asylee process is,” said Juan Proaño, LULAC’s CEO.

LULAC has been embroiled in a legal fight with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office recently targeted the homes of several of the group’s members with search warrants, confiscating their phones and laptops. Paxton’s office has said it is looking into allegations of voter fraud. Those targeted have denied any wrongdoing, and LULAC has asked the Justice Department to investigate Texas for potential civil rights violations.

Kathleen Joseph-Bush, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, said the lawsuits filed by states against federal immigration policies are another way they have reshaped immigration policy in recent years. Texas and other Republican-led have challenged virtually every major action by Mr. Biden on immigration, recently convincing a court to pause a program that would grant legal status to some undocumented immigrants married to U.S. citizens.

“States are succeeding, though litigation, in halting or stalling nationwide immigration policy affecting hundreds of thousands of people,” Joseph-Bush said.

In the absence of congressional reforms to the immigration system over the past three decades, the federal government and states have each taken more unilateral actions on the issue, she noted.

“The outdated nature of the immigration system, writ large being from the 80s and 90s, means that it’s not up to the challenges of the 21st century,” Joseph-Bush said. “And the difficulties that both the states and the federal government have are exacerbated by this issue of not having an updated system.”

Fin Gómez

contributed to this report.