These vehicles along the Rio Grande are part of the state’s effort to thwart border crossings. Credit: Michael Karlis

Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.

When Ronald Reagan spoke of America as a “shining city on a hill,” I don’t think he meant a gated community.

As Gov. Greg Abbott drags lawmakers back for yet another special session to attempt ramrod his voucher scheme through the Texas Legislature, an unprecedented anti-immigration bill is also high on his agenda and hasn’t received similar pushback — or even attention.

“Texas will authorize the removal of anyone who illegally enters our state with penalties up to 20 years in prison for refusing to comply,” Abbott said in a Nov. 7 press release describing the measure. He added: “To crack down on repeated attempts, illegal re-entry will be penalized with up to 20 years in prison.”

Here’s how that would work. If any level of law enforcement — from a local cop to a school resource officer — has reason to suspect someone crossed the border in the past two years and isn’t a citizen, the official may immediately detain the person and march them to a designated port of entry. There, the Border Patrol can order you to return from whence you came. Should you fail to obey —  say, because a drug cartel or an authoritarian regime is trying to murder you — then you can rot in prison for a couple of decades.

That’s about as clear as it can be — in Abbott’s own words, in the text of the bill itself, which already passed the House, and in the testimony of the bill’s author.

Except many news outlets have grossly misreported the details, in what amounts to a glaring case of journalistic malpractice.

The Texas Tribune, typically a dependable source of fact-based reporting, wrote that a first-time offender could be punished with up to 180 days behind bars and the penalty would increase to two years in prison for a repeat offense.

That’s simply false.

First off, it’s not “up to two years,” it’s at least two years and up to 20 years. Pretty big difference. And that penalty may accrue on the very first offense, not only after repeated re-entries, provided the suspect in custody fails to return to their country of origin. We’re not simply talking about a mere misdemeanor but a second-degree felony — same as arson, sexual assault or bribery of a government official.

And the Tribune isn’t alone. The Dallas Morning News made the same mistake, as did Houston TV station KHOU. None of the three has issued an update or correction.

Charitably, we might say that the text of the proposed law is so ridiculously awful that the mind of a seasoned beat reporter struggles to accurately relay the absurd truth. However, even news stories that have gotten the facts right tend to focus on the bill’s fiscal realities rather than its gross civil rights violations. Take the Express-News, for example.

“State budget officials punted on trying to estimate how much the Senate draft House Bill 4 would cost, writing that ‘the demand for state correctional resources cannot be determined due to a lack of data,'” the daily reported. The piece went on to catalog the monetary cost of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star border crackdown and how much the state is spending per mile on its border wall.

True, from a dollars-and-cents perspective, the bottom line is damn near bottomless. During testimony on HB 4, Bexar County Governmental Affairs Director Melissa Shannon projected its steep cost for taxpayers.

“If at the very minimum, 10% of the 80,000 undocumented immigrants in Bexar County are arrested and detained in our adult detention center, we’d need to add another new county court,” she said. “We’re already unable to hire enough sheriff’s deputies to man our detention center; they’re already maxed out, working mandatory overtime, 24 hours at a time — it’s just ungodly.”

One should also mention, as courts of appeals are expected to, that the proposed state law openly violates the Supremacy Clause, since deportation is the federal government’s exclusive purview.

But all this seems beside the point. Barbara Hines, a retired immigration lawyer who founded the immigration clinic at University of Texas Law School, delivered the most poignant testimony on why lawmakers should reject the proposal.

“U.S. immigration law and international law allows migrants to file for asylum once they’re in the United States regardless of their manner of entry,” she testified. “This is very personal to me, as my parents and relatives fled Nazi Germany. Many of them crossed illegally across the border into Belgium and would otherwise not be here today.”

The morally relevant question remains: is it ethical, is it just, is it remotely humane to imprison someone for 20 years for failing to leave what we tout as the greatest country on Earth?

Representatives for the Children’s Defense Fund, Catholic Charities, Human Rights Watch, Working Defense Action Fund and the Texas Civil Rights Project

all registered adamant opposition to that prospect, yet received next to nothing in media coverage.

Perhaps in an effort to be fair to “both sides,” journalists fell derelict in their duty to honestly state how cruel, how unusual and how utterly fucked up this law is.

And that’s a disservice to every Texas voter.

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This article appears in Nov 15-28, 2023.