MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Immigrant rights groups have criticized two immigration bills filed for the 2025 regular session of the Alabama Legislature.
HB 7, sponsored by Rep. Ernie Yarbrough, R-Trinity, allows local law enforcement agencies, such as sheriffs and police departments throughout the state, to enter into MOUs with the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.
HB 3, sponsored by Rep. Chip Brown, R-Hollinger’s Island, would enhance penalties for undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes.
Messages seeking comment were left with Yarbrough and Brown. Yarbrough filed a version of his bill last year, and accused the federal government of not enforcing immigration laws at a meeting of the Alabama House’s Public Safety and Homeland Security in April.
“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 back in April.
Studies have found that undocumented immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than those born in the United States. Alabama also has far lower rates of immigration than the country as a whole. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 3.8% of Alabama’s population is foreign-born, compared to 14% for the United States.
Yarbrough’s bill would allow state law enforcement agencies authorized to enforce federal immigration laws “to arrest, with probable cause, any individual suspected of being an illegal alien.”
If a person is incarcerated in jail, staff will try and determine if the individual is an undocumented immigrant. If the individual is unable to provide documentation, jail staff will contact The Law Enforcement Support Center of the United States Department of Homeland Security.
Allison Hamilton, executive director of the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, said Yarbrough’s bill would make communities less safe.
“The worst part about the bill is that it gives permission, and actually encourages law enforcement to arrest people they suspect of being undocumented,” Hamilton said. “That is not good for law enforcement, it is really harmful for trust in communities that have crime issues.”
The bills come as former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has called for “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. Alabama in 2011 passed HB 56, a law that aimed at criminalizing every aspect of an undocumented immigrant’s existence. Among other provisions, the statute allowed law enforcement to detain those they suspected of being in the country unlawfully. Most of HB 56 was later overturned by federal courts.
“It is impossible to determine someone’s immigration status just by looking at them,” Hamilton said. “But this is encouraging law enforcement to arrest people that they suspect of being an undocumented immigrant. There is really no information to inform them about how to look for an undocumented immigrant other than racially profiling them.”
Enforcing the country’s immigration laws falls to the federal government, but there are times when it solicits the assistance of state and local law enforcement.
“Those have been controversial programs, but those have been held up in the courts,” said J. Kevin Appleby, senior fellow for policy & communications with the Center for Migration Studies, an educational institute and nonpartisan think tank based in New York City that studies domestic immigration and international migration issues. “Their effectiveness was in question because it made them immigration agents and divided their attention away from crime in their neighborhoods.”
The Department of Homeland Security operates the 287(g) program, which allows the department to enter into MOUs with state and local law enforcement agencies and “deputize” them to enforce immigration laws, according to a report from the American Immigration Council published in 2021.
As of 2023, law enforcement agencies around the country had entered the program, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit that advocates for immigrants and provides training, legal and communication resources.
The report from the American Immigration Council cited several problems, including “widespread racial profiling” arrests for minor criminal offenses. Cost was another issue.
“In February 2017, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez announced that Harris County, Texas, would terminate its 287(g) agreement, saying that the decision was a resource allocation issue,” the report states. “The sheriff said he would put the $675,000 the county spent on the program toward improving clearance rates of major crimes and other priorities.”
Brown’s bill would enhance criminal penalties for undocumented immigrants convicted of felonies and misdemeanors involving children. An undocumented immigrant convicted of a Class D felony, which typically carries a sentence of one to five years in prison, will be a Class C felony, punishable by one to 10 years in prison.
Class C felonies become Class B felonies, punishable by two to 20 years in prison. Class B felonies then become Class A felonies, punishable by 10 years to life in prison. Those convicted of a Class A felony will serve at least 15 years in prison.
The bill also states that undocumented immigrants convicted of a misdemeanor for a crime involving a minor be sentenced to a Class C felony.
Tom Jawetz, a senior fellow for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, a left leaning think tank, said that all available evidence “establishes that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than those with lawful status.”
“There’s no reason to believe immigrants regardless of status are any more likely than anyone else to commit crimes against minors,” he said. “There is nothing new about scapegoating immigrants as a threat to public safety.”
A study from Northwestern University published in March 2024, which analyzed 150 years of U.S. Census data, found that immigrants were less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States.
Hamilton added that immigrants make major contributions to the country.
“Immigrants are paying taxes, they are paying toward Medicare and Social Security that they will never collect on,” she said. “I think it is really important for people in Alabama to understand that immigrants in Alabama are propping up our own safety nets. And they are doing jobs that need to be done that no one else wants to do.”
This article originally appeared in the Alabama Reflector, an independent, nonprofit news outlet. It appears on FOX54.com under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.