Feds often hand migrants over to state police rather than process immigration claims - ACLU of TX
The Texas Tribune
[link:https://www.texastribune.org/2022/12/02/texas-migrant-arrests-border-patrol/|
Feds often hand migrants over to state police rather than process immigration claims, complaint says
State police often rely on federal immigration officials to lock up migrants on state trespassing charges, according to a new complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas. The collaboration contradicts federal and Texas officials’ attacks on each other’s immigration policies.
BY JOLIE MCCULLOUGH DEC. 2, 202217 HOURS AGO
Many of the thousands of migrants arrested on trespassing charges under Gov. Greg Abbott’s border security operation have been locked up in Texas prisons only after U.S. Border Patrol agents handed them over to state police, according to a new complaint to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
At least once, Texas Department of Public Safety officers never even saw the arrested migrants on the scene of the alleged trespassing, instead picking them up from federal agents at a gas station and taking them to jail, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas reported Friday in its letter to federal officials.
The ACLU of Texas argued that federal government officials should not be assisting Texas’ controversial “arrest-and-jail” approach by sending migrants off to face state charges instead of processing their immigration cases.
The complaint stems from an analysis of police reports on more than 350 trespassing arrests made this summer under Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. A quarter of those arrests were made with Border Patrol involvement, the civil rights organization said, with federal agents providing surveillance information to state police or both agencies working side by side and divvying up migrants for arrest or immigration processing based largely on their gender.
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