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President Trump has enacted sweeping executive orders that crack down on immigration. Federal law enforcement officers arrested dozens of people in Texas in an immigration crackdown on Sunday.
TPR's Marian Navarro spoke to San Antonio Congressman Greg Casar about how those policies are affecting people in San Antonio and throughout South Texas.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Marian Navarro: In the short time since Donald Trump has taken office, he's unleashed a flurry of immigration orders and executive actions — from taking down CBP One to targeting birthright citizenship, to the immigration raids. How do these orders impact San Antonio and Texas?
Greg Casar: I think it's really important for people in the San Antonio area, when you're an immigrant or not, to know your basic rights.
To know that you don't actually have to answer questions about your immigration status. To know that you have the right to speak to an attorney. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right if any law enforcement officer comes and knocks at your door to ask for a warrant and to have that warrant slipped under the door or shown to you through a window.
Those are actually basic rights that are important and have been sacred to liberals and conservatives and independents and Americans of all types for over a century. I think it's really important to know those rights and to exercise those rights.
There are members of Congress that believe that we shouldn't be villainizing immigrants. That we should be protecting the equal rights of all people. That we can have public safety and public order, while also respecting and recognizing that part of the Texas fabric and a key part of San Antonio, is immigrant communities.
People that have moved back and forth over generations in a place where the border has actually changed where it was over the course of generations and centuries. San Antonio's history is one of all different kinds of people making up the culture and economy of San Antonio.
Instead of picking on people that are just trying to go about their daily life, we should really be focusing on making things more safe and more fair.
Navarro: The U.S. Department of Justice threatened to prosecute local officials that they say are standing in the way of immigration enforcement. [The San Antonio Police Department] has said that it will cooperate with federal authorities the way that it always has. El Paso is saying that it's not going to use its police to help enforce these immigration orders. What role is local law enforcement across Texas going to play in these orders as they play out?
Casar: The overwhelming majority of law enforcement officials I've spoken to — at the local, county, state, federal level — if you're in just basic law enforcement and non-immigration enforcement, they usually don't want to be getting mixed up in immigration enforcement.
They've got backlogs of cases they've got to deal with. They've got unsolved cases of violent crime. They have people on warrants for really serious crimes that they need to be able to go and arrest. I mean, there is real work for all of our law enforcement agencies to do.
When I've talked to police officers in San Antonio, again, they want to be working on keeping people safe. They don't want suddenly to be taken off of their case to all of a sudden go deal with the immigration beat. That's what federal immigration enforcement is supposed to be about.
When you hear people like Trump saying that he wants to take over our local law enforcement resources to run his anti-immigrant agenda, you’ve got to remember that actually hurts the safety of everyday people in San Antonio and across Texas. So I feel confident that our sheriffs and our police chiefs will follow the law.
