“Texas, forever’ for whom?”

I never imagined being a Good Samaritan would be illegal in my beloved Texas.

Yet here we are. We are in a race to the bottom, so those with race, money, and power use everything in their power to uplift a heroic Anglo narrative that never actually reflects reality.

I was in high school when Ann Richards was governor. I was in college when Dubya was in the governor’s mansion. I worked as a teacher trying to make ends meet in Austin when Rick Perry took the helm. And for nearly ten years, Greg Abbott has been the most powerful man in the state.

And the state of our state is bleak.

After costing taxpayers close to $12 million in special session expenses and sitting on an exorbitant slush fund, the governor took four special sessions to pass the draconian Smuggling Law in effect today. The Racial Profiling Law was set to go into effect on March 5, despite a dogged fight against them by taxpayers, advocates, and elected officials alike.

Despite all of these attacks, Texas already is the multiracial democracy that the United States will be in short order. Sadly, the governor and his supporters are threatened by this and are using everything they’ve got to disenfranchise Texans along racial lines.

If your knowledge of Texas history goes deeper than what we learned in seventh grade, you know that before becoming governor, Abbott served as the longest-serving attorney general and per his bio, “earned a national reputation for defending religious liberty and protecting Texas communities and children. He also previously served as a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court and as a State District Judge in Harris County.”

As a UT Austin and Vanderbilt Law School graduate, he’s no dummy. Yet his actions towards people of faith accompanying those on the move are abhorrent. Abbott knows exactly what he’s doing by targeting Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian Texans with these laws.

If you are a critical thinker, you can see that Abbott and the State have used every legal maneuver to make our state less inclusive, diverse, and more restrictive.

Immigration is intersectional because it’s a legal status that affects human beings with robust lives trying to work, thrive, and provide a good life for their kids, just like every other Texan.

In short, we’re not falling for it. The facts speak for themselves:

• Over 1 million Texans, primarily Brown and Black kiddos, do not have access to federally funded Medicaid Insurance
• Only 25.7% of Texas school-age children are White, and Hispanics make up over 50% of these kiddos.
• Texas is the state with the largest land border with Mexico, with 28 border crossings, two terminals at the Galveston Seaport, and the highest number of ICE detainees out of all 50 states in 21 ICE detention facilities statewide.
• Texas has the highest number of people incarcerated in the United States and is one of 21 states that actively subject people to the death penalty.
• It took action by the U.S. Supreme Court to grant the Biden administration to allow federal Border Patrol agents to cut or move razor wire installed by Texas along a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border.
• Texas is the site of 9 mass shootings, including the massacres at Walmart locally and Robb Elementary School in Uvalde over the last 14 years.
• Most people 21 or over can legally carry a handgun in a holster without a permit, both openly and/or concealed in Texas.
• 149 migrants died in West Texas, with no way to track them and/or repatriate their remains in 2023.
• It took a federal judge to strike down a provision of Texas law requiring that mail voters provide the same identification number they used when they registered to vote. It violated the U.S. Civil Rights Act because it made people unable to cast ballots due to a matter irrelevant to whether they were registered.
• The Texas power grid that services most of the state collapsed in a winter storm in 2021 and is yet to be fully operational to meet the needs of all Texans.
• Abortions in Texas ceased following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that eliminated its constitutional protection so Texans who want to access abortion at any stage of pregnancy have to travel out of state, look beyond the U.S.-Mexico border or operate outside of the law, while others will carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

And on and on and on.

This race to the bottom must end. That’s why we’re sounding the alarm to all concerned neighbors in these United States to stand in solidarity with Annunciation House, Las Americas, and all of us in Abbott’s crosshairs.

Over time, these laws were surgically written to disempower and subjugate, if not erase, us altogether.

And to be abundantly clear, we’re not going anywhere. And we will fight like hell to protect one another and our very Texan way of life.

Marisa Limón Garza is the Executive Director of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, Texas.

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