Abdoul, a 32-year-old West African, had an unexpected detour before arriving in New York City, Texas, this year along with thousands of other migrants: after crossing the border between the United States and Mexico, he spent weeks in a remote Texas jail on accusations of local trespassing.
Abdoul is a political activist who left Mauritania out of fear of persecution. “I spent many hours without sleeping, sitting on the floor,” he claimed. He only talked with the stipulation that his last name not be revealed because doing so might endanger his refugee application.
Texas will give municipal judges the power to order migrants who enter the state illegally to leave the country, and police will be able to arrest them starting in March. Two years after Texas started a smaller-scale program to detain immigrants for trespassing, the state passed a new statute. However, there are few signs that the operation, which also aimed to stop unauthorized crossings, has been successful.
The findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of arrests in preventing immigration as Texas prepares to offer police even more authority to detain those accused of entering the country illegally. Civil rights groups have already filed a lawsuit to overturn the new law, which Republican Governor Greg Abbott signed, claiming it to be an unlawful overreach that infringes on the immigration power of the United States government.
