Like many other teenagers, Karla Perez eagerly awaited her 16th birthday and the chance to pass her driving test. The driving school told her to bring her social security card to class, so she asked her mother for it.
“She said I didn’t have one, and that’s when she explained it to me,” Perez recalled. She was not a US citizen but an undocumented immigrant. Her parents, seeking a better life, brought her to Houston from Mexico City when she was two. They never discussed her status, thinking that by her mid-teens she would have a green card through an American grandparent.
Perez gave up on the idea of driving – quite a hardship in such a car-centric city. But as she pursued her ambition of going to law school, she was grateful for a benefit unusual in such a deep-red state: the right to pay tuition at the same rate charged to legal Texas residents. Without it, her degree might have been unaffordable.
Then came the election of Donald Trump last November and the start of the Texas legislature’s 2017 session two months later.
The same state that introduced the tuition law 16 years earlier, the place with an estimated 1.7m unauthorised immigrants, passed a hardline measure known as SB4 that compels local law enforcement to work with federal immigration authorities to hand over migrants for potential deportation, in effect banning “sanctuary cities”. The White House would like to do the same nationwide.
“It was definitely not a surprise to see after the elections how the Republican party has been emboldened to take extreme measures to vilify and criminalise immigrants,” Perez said last week. “They are very much emboldened by what’s happening at the national level. They’re carrying out Trump’s deportation agenda.”
Perez was one of hundreds who protested against SB4 at the Texas statehouse in Austin on Monday, amid scenes of mayhem on the floor of the house of representatives.
Matt Rinaldi, a Republican, said he called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in response to the presence of demonstrators holding “I am illegal and here to stay” signs. Ramon Romero, a Democratic representative, reportedly quoted Rinaldi as saying: “Fuck them, I called Ice.”
Rinaldi claimed he was threatened by Democratic representatives and assaulted by Romero, who denied the accusation. Rinaldi said he asserted that if a Democratic member, Alfonso “Poncho” Nevarez, made good on a pledge to “get him” when he left the chamber: “I would shoot him in self-defence.”
Nevarez said on Twitter that Rinaldi was “a liar and hateful man”.
The loss of decorum in a hyper-partisan atmosphere recalled the excesses of Trump’s anything-goes presidential campaign. At a gun range on Friday, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott signed a bill into law that reduces the cost of a handgun license. With a Trumpesque level of regard for the media, he joked about shooting reporters.
‘Texas was ahead of the curve’
There are similarities in policy-making as well as posturing. The country’s most populous Republican-led state is a laboratory for the kind of extreme rightwing positions on cultural touchstones that helped propel Trump to power.
“Whatever direction you see the curve bending, Texas was ahead of the curve,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.
“Trumpism is, to some degree, Texas Republicanism gone national. [Lieutenant Governor] Dan Patrick was kind of where Trump was before Trump was there, in terms of thinking about conservative populism built around nativism and catering to Republican primary voters’ preoccupation with immigration and border security.”
Patrick is a radio show host who became lieutenant governor in 2015. He was also the state chairman of the 2016 Trump campaign. “We have a good friend in the White House,” he declared on election night.
Monday was the last scheduled day of the Texas legislative session. But Patrick forced a stand-off over his demand to pass a “bathroom bill” limiting access for transgender people that may yet see a special session called by Abbott.
A compromise measure applying only to public schools was set to pass earlier this month – but to the frustration of the dwindling number of GOP moderates, it was too diluted for Patrick’s taste. “It’s absurd that bathroom bills have taken on greater urgency than fixing our school finance system,” Joe Straus, the speaker of the house, told reporters.
What remaining middle ground there was has crumbled. When SB4 was debated on the house floor, Republicans refused to accept amendments offered by Democrats to limit its scope, instead making it tougher by allowing officers to check the immigration status of anyone they merely detain, as well as arrest. The first line of the bill notes that it applies to agencies including “campus police departments”. Places of learning are not safe havens.
One of the most passionate voices against the bill belonged to Gene Wu, a Democratic representative from Houston who was born in China.
“I think having Trump in the White House made a big difference,” Wu said. “I think the anti-immigrant wing of the Republican party has been emboldened, the racists and the bigots have sort of been given free rein to do and say what they want and push their agenda harder.
“Some of it is that in Texas, it never went away. The problem is that now it’s come … to a head as an issue among the Republican party that is harder and harder for those moderates and people that are rational to basically hold it back.”
Statewide elections in Texas are so uncompetitive – Democrats last won one in 1994 – that Republican primaries are all-important. Long before Trump’s ascent, that resulted in bombastic rhetoric and ideological law-making to appeal to a relatively small base with a strong Tea Party inflection.
Like the president, the Texas GOP is feeding a sense of grievance. Polls last June for the Texas Politics Project showed many Republican respondents felt Christians endure more discrimination than Muslim, African American, Hispanic, transgender, gay or lesbian people, and believe white people are among society’s most victimised groups.
Despite the political and economic fallout endured by North Carolina when it passed a “bathroom bill” limiting access for transgender people last year, Patrick made a similar law one of his top priorities, over the objections of state business boosters. Proponents were given a lift in February when the Trump administration rescinded federal guidelines telling schools students should use facilities corresponding with their gender identity.
The “bathroom bill” is not the only proposal that has alarmed LGBTQ advocates. Andy Delony and his husband, Brendan Robert, live in Austin. They married in Massachusetts in 2005 and formally adopted four children from troubled backgrounds in 2010, in a relatively smooth process.
“They’ve gone from barely functional to absolutely brilliant, all of them,” Delony said. But he and Robert now worry that gay Texans, among others, could find it harder to adopt after state lawmakers passed a so-called religious freedom bill that supporters say provides valuable legal protection but critics argue will make it easier for agencies to reject potential parents based on “sincerely held religious beliefs”.
“This bill will restrict the number of homes available to children and it will definitely restrict the number of agencies that will serve children who are non-traditional in either religion or gender or sexuality,” Delony said.
His eldest son, Andy Delony-Robert, 19, who is bisexual, is preparing to attend New York University. He said his adoptive family was “one of the best things that could have come my way.” He believes the presidential executive order “promoting free speech and religious liberty” that Trump signed on 4 May encouraged Texas to pass the foster care and adoption law.
“That opened the door,” he said. “If I were to enter into a same-sex relationship and go to adopt, this law would have a chance of preventing me from doing so … The idea that I could just be rejected for who I am is appalling and terrifying to me.”
‘The antithesis of the Obama model’
If Trump’s ascent has afforded rightwingers increased license to pass conservative laws, it is also forcing a strategic adjustment. Abbott, the governor, described his previous job as attorney general as: “I go into the office, I sue the federal government, and I go home.”
“There was a very active effort among many Republican legislators to locate Texas as the antithesis of the Obama model,” said Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University. “And so if the Obama administration did one thing, you were trying to pass legislation or a resolution that did the opposite.”
In contrast, Jones said: “Trump poses some difficulties for Republicans since while they agree with him more in policy than President Obama, they also have lost one of their best foils to use to campaign against Democratic candidates here in Texas.”
Instead of aiming at Washington, such candidates have turned their sights inwards, to the state’s biggest cities. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Austin all lean Democratic. The original “bathroom bill” proposal would have superseded local non-discrimination ordinances. And when the Austin-area sheriff, Sally Hernandez, said in January that she would pursue only limited co-operation with federal immigration officers, Abbott went on the offensive, threatening to oust her and cutting $1.5m in grant money to Travis County.
The obsession with immigration is so pronounced that amid a budget squeeze because of a downturn in the oil industry, and facing a number of pressing social problems, the Texas legislature still voted to put its money where Trump’s mouth is and allocate $800m in funding for border security, which is a federal responsibility.
It did the same in 2015, citing the Obama administration’s supposed fecklessness on the issue. The fresh money comes even though Trump has, of course, pledged to build a wall along the southern border and massively increase funding for the Department of Homeland Security. But $3m was not forthcoming to help victims of sex trafficking, the Texas Tribune reported.
As for clearing the state’s backlog of thousands of rape kits? The legislature is happy to pay – via crowdfunding, that is.
The pushback
As at the national level, Texas liberals are retaliating via the courts. The state that relished suing the federal government is set to be on the receiving end of a deluge of litigation: abortion rights groups are expected to battle efforts to curtail access and several lawsuits have already been filed against SB4.
Now 24, Perez, the student, is a member of United We Dream, an immigrant youth rights group. She has one more year of law school at the University of Houston and aims to become an immigration attorney representing women and children survivors of crimes.
She is also a Dreamer, a beneficiary of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), the Obama-era deportation deferral programme with an uncertain future that gives her a precarious legal status – and the right to get behind the wheel. She is worried nonetheless that under SB4, if she is ever stopped by police she could be detained as they examine her background.
Perez is fighting for a more compassionate climate. On Monday’s evidence, there is a long way to go.
“Those of us who benefited [from Daca] will refuse to be forced back to … a place of shame and fear that I used to have,” she said.
“Can’t go back.”
