DONALD TRUMP WANTS YOU TO ENVISION a world where providing running water or renting an apartment to illegal immigrants is a crime. Where law enforcement acting upon “reasonable suspicion” can detain people to determine their immigration status. Where anyone who gives a person in the country illegally a ride—even giving a colleague a ride to work or a neighbor a ride home—can be penalized. Where undocumented people can neither seek work nor enroll in public college. Where schools must collecting immigration status information from children—including about their parents.
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In 2011, Alabama passed HB 56, which contained some of these very same provisions. It was widely considered the harshest in the nation at the time. And it was chaos.
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The National Immigration Law Center found at the time that the costs of HB 56 went far beyond economic dislocation. It created an environment of racial profiling by law enforcement officials and sanctioned discrimination by private citizens against anyone suspected of being “foreign.”
Legal challenges largely succeeded in defanging the law, but the political life and death of HB 56 still provides lessons for the Trump administration and Republicans as they try to make the lives of undocumented immigrants impossible.
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Undocumented immigrants fled the state, school attendance plummeted, fruits and vegetables rotted on the vine after farmworkers disappeared and Americans given the chance to replace them couldn’t make it through one day of work.
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State Rep. Mickey Hammon, a co-sponsor who would later go to prison for mail fraud, said at the time that the law was modeled after Arizona’s hardline SB1070, which itself was watered down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The difference, Hammon added, was that HB 56 had an “Alabama flavor” that “attacks every aspect of an illegal immigrant’s life.”
Local Republicans, elected officials, and law enforcement who had to deal with the realities of HB 56 turned against it long ago—a change of heart that could serve as a warning to MAGA acolytes following Trump and Stephen Miller into enforcement oblivion.
The Bulwark
COULD serve, but MAGA hasn't heeded any of the many warnings they've received over the last decade.
“THE ALABAMA LAW CRASHED AND BURNED because it was a Frankenstein monster, it was unlawful from start to finish,” said Karen Tumlin, the managing attorney who authored the NILC report on the law. She said to this day she still remembers the traumatic hotline phone calls that went directly to her personal cell phone.
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Tumlin was also shocked when a law student intern saw a sign outside a public utility which said “Citizens Only” for water, sewage, and electricity, recalling Jim Crow.
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Complaints commonly involved bullying of Latino children at school. At the elementary school in Crossville, one teacher asked students whose parents were born outside the United States to raise their hands. Some children threatened to report Latino classmates and their families to immigration authorities and asked why they hadn’t gone back to Mexico, the report said.
Texas would like to contribute.
Beyond the testing of the strictures of the law, Tumlin said she fears another echo of Alabama: The bubbling up of private hate that can only be counteracted by Americans of good conscience.
“What keeps me up at night is that when the state or federal government goes so far to target immigrants, we see the floodgates of private hatred open up,” she said.
I’ve covered a lot of heavy stories in my career: the trial of George Zimmerman after he killed Trayvon Martin, followed by more killings of black people by white men, then the 23-month-old girl and her father who were found drowned in the Rio Grande, then the El Paso Walmart shooting.
The death of Jocelynn Rojo Carranza is one of the stories I won’t forget.
Marbella Carranza, Jocelynn’s mother, says schoolmates bullied her daughter over being Hispanic, threatening that they were going to speak to immigration to take her parents, and she was going to be left alone. She says the school was aware but did not inform her of the bullying.
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