Last November, Texas Senate Bill 4 (SB 4) was passed and signed by Republi-fascist Governor Abbott. This straight-up fascist bill should be called the “Unleash the Racist Pigs” law, or the “Show Me Your Papers Act.”

SB 4 was supposed to go into effect on March 5, but on February 29, a Federal District Court judge issued a temporary order blocking it. Texas appealed that order to higher fascist-dominated courts, so what will happen with this is still to be determined. (More on this below.)

Here are some of the main features of SB 4:

• SB 4 is a blatantly unconstitutional and outrageous power grab by the fascist-run state of Texas. Under longstanding and reaffirmed decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government exclusive control of immigration and the border. States cannot legally make their own immigration policies. Texas doing so—with this bill and other aggressive state-wide policies—is part of their attempts to hammer into place a fascist society while undercutting the power of their ruling class rivals in the federal government.
   
• SB 4 instructs and empowers cops in Texas to detain anyone they “suspect” may have entered the state illegally in the last two years. This means every cop in the state (80,000 plus) will be able to strut around like the notoriously brutal and racist federal Border Patrol, enforcing laws designed to oppress immigrants—and to do that anywhere in the state, not just in the border region.
   
• If the cops are not “satisfied” that the people they’ve targeted have a legal right to be here, they can charge them with “Illegal Entry” to Texas, a misdemeanor carrying up to six months in jail. If this is a second “offense,” or if the person has been previously deported from the U.S., they can be charged with “Illegal Re-entry,” a felony carrying 10 to 20 years in prison.

Three things stand out about this. 

One, this is an intense escalation of repression of immigrants. It puts a major emphasis on locking people up for months, years or decades for the “crime” of fleeing their imperialist-dominated homelands, of braving terrible hardship and danger for the basic ability to survive. It will make every immigrant, with or without documents, feel all the more demonized and hunted. And it is right in line with Trump’s “promise” to build huge concentration camps for immigrants if he takes power.

Two, SB 4 is throwing the door wide open to racial profiling of all non-white Texans, and/or all those speaking Spanish or other “foreign” languages. Especially since, in the minds of fascist enforcers, none of “those people belong here” even if they were born here, or legally immigrated. SB 4 is giving pigs the excuse and authority to harass, humiliate and detain people pretty much at will. Faced with this, will “suspected immigrants” have to carry documents like immigration papers or birth certificates whenever they leave their homes? Will the ugly demand to “Show me your papers” reverberate through their communities, making them feel even more like occupied territory than they already do? 

Three, the fact that Texas passed and is still fighting for this law is a sign that the “old order”—the “normal” and legal ways the capitalist-imperialist system worked for decades and even centuries—is being ripped apart “from within” by rival sections of the ruling class. And this also creates opportunities for it to be not only “ripped apart,” but overthrown by millions of the victims of this order, and a whole different and better world brought into being... not in some far off time, but in this time! Why this is true and how this can be seized on is broken down in a powerful series of social media dispatches from the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian, here.

As we said earlier, the legality of SB 4 is now being fought out in the courts, and is likely to be settled by the fascist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court. So there is a real chance that it will still become law in Texas, and if that happens, it is very likely that other fascist-run states will pass similar laws. 

But even if the Supreme Court does not rule their way, SB 4 is a clear “statement of intent” by the fascists to radically escalate their racist attacks on immigrants and their drive to consolidate all-out fascism on a national level.