Alabama House bill would allow local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws

Rep. Ernie Yarbrough, R-Trinity, greets a colleague on the floor of the Alabama House of Representatives on Feb. 6, 2024 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)

An Alabama House committee Wednesday held a public hearing on a bill that would allow state and local law enforcement to arrest people based on immigration status.

HB 376, sponsored by Rep. Ernie Yarbrough, R-Trinity, would allow sheriffs’ offices and police departments to to enter into agreements with federal agencies to enforce the country’s immigration laws and investigate people’s immigration status. Under current law the Alabama attorney general’s office has that power.

“Our nation’s security and the lives of our people are at great risk because the federal government has largely abandoned its sworn duty to uphold and defend with regards to the southern border,” Yarbrough told the House Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday.

The committee could vote on the bill next week.

The bill allows police and sheriffs’ deputies to transport undocumented immigrants and arrest people based on their immigration status or for violating federal immigration law. It would withhold funding from agencies that do not comply with the law.

Yarbrough’s legislation would also require state and local agencies to maintain information providing details on people’s immigration status. It also requires county and municipal jails to abide with immigration detainer requests and generate a report on the number of foreign nationals they counter each quarter.

The bill gives police officers and sheriffs’ deputies the discretion for deciding who they will approach to confirm a person’s immigration status.

Opponents who spoke at the hearing said the measure would create fear and potentially hinder law enforcement efforts.

“HB 376 imposes stringent requirements for victims to disclose their immigration status, creating barriers that force them to choose between seeking help and risking deportation, in addition to shattering their fragile sense of security,” said Ana Ockert of the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama. “With the knowledge that human trafficking is happening in Alabama, we should be encouraging victims to come forward.”

Rep. TaShina Morris, D-Montgomery, questioned how law enforcement could identify someone who lacks authorization to be in the country. One significant criticism of the bill relates to identifying individuals who law enforcement suspects of residing in the state without the proper authorization.

“I want to know what profiling and targeting look like for your bill when you are actually seeing someone out,” she said. “How do you come up with the sense of knowing who are illegal aliens?”

“I would assume, in the normal course of law enforcement, that the police who are on the rounds each and every day, they are witnessing, they are seeing, they are observing, there are things that are being reported,” Yarbrough said. “For example, Sheriff (Eric) Balentine in Colbert County has stacks of complaints of violations of noise ordinances, of citizens calling in suspicious behavior.”

Congress had been negotiating legislation to address issues related to immigration. Some of the provisions include raising that would have raised the standard for migrants claiming asylum and create a procedure to shut down the border at especially active times.

The package would have also provided more than $20 billion for additional resources to the southern border. The bill failed after former President Donald Trump, who has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” refused to support the measure, hoping to use the issue in his campaign for a second term.

Some Republicans on the committee suggested undocumented immigrants endangered the country.

“We are at a point in this country where we are being invaded,” said Rep. Tracy Estes, R-Winfield. “It may not always be with weapons and with military might as we typically imagine invasion, and since the federal government as abdicated its role and done such a poor job of enforcing existing laws and protecting its people, unfortunately, whether its Texas or Alabama, or other states in the southern part of this country, we have found this dumped on our laps where we are having to address this problem.”

But immigrants by and large skip Alabama. Just 3.8% of the state’s population is foreign-born, according to the U.S. Census. The number nationally is about 14%.  There is little evidence to suggest that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than those who are born in the U.S.

“I think based on the language that was used in the committee hearing, we heard a lot of talk that sounds like replacement theory,” said Jerome Dees, SPLC Action Fund Alabama policy director. “This fanciful concern that individuals have of losing what America is or was. But honestly, it is pure racist ideology.”

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