Texas Senate Bill 8 is the Fugitive Abortion Act of 2021

Section 7 – And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct, hinder, or prevent such claimant, his agent or attorney, or any person or persons lawfully assisting him, her, or them, from arresting such a fugitive from service or labor, either with or without process as aforesaid, or shall rescue, or attempt to rescue, such fugitive from service or labor, from the custody of such claimant, his or her agent or attorney, or other person or persons lawfully assisting as aforesaid, when so arrested, pursuant to the authority herein given and declared; or shall aid, abet, or assist such person so owing service or labor as aforesaid, directly or indirectly, to escape from such claimant, his agent or attorney, or other person or persons legally authorized as aforesaid; or shall harbor or conceal such fugitive, so as to prevent the discovery and arrest of such person, after notice or knowledge of the fact that such person was a fugitive from service or labor as aforesaid, shall, for either of said offences, be subject to a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, and imprisonment not exceeding six months, by indictment and conviction before the District Court of the United States for the district in which such offence may have been committed, or before the proper court of criminal jurisdiction, if committed within any one of the organized Territories of the United States; and shall moreover forfeit and pay, by way of civil damages to the party injured by such illegal conduct, the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost as aforesaid, to be recovered by action of debt, in any of the District or Territorial Courts aforesaid, within whose jurisdiction the said offence may have been committed.

That’s Section 7 of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This Act of Congress allowed states and territories of the U.S. to create commissioners to hunt down black Americans who escaped slavery and return them to their enslavers. If an enslaved person was able to reach a state that had legally banned slavery, their enslaved status was not overturned. Instead, the people of that state were forced, by Section 7, to void their own antislavery laws by helping the slave commissioners in whatever way those commissioners demanded: help them to find enslaved people, take them into custody, guard them while they awaited return to their enslaver, and turn them over to the enslaver. Preventing a slave commissioner from enforcing slavery in a free state was illegal. Helping an enslaved person hide or escape was illegal. Knowing about people who were helping or hiding enslaved people was illegal, because it was a form of “hindering” the slave commissioner. The penalty for those who hindered slavery, directly or indirectly, was a $1,000 fine (a fortune in the mid-1800s), up to six months in prison, and another $1,000 fine to pay back the enslaver the “civil damages” they experienced as “the party injured by such illegal conduct”. Since very few Americans would have $1,000 to pay the first fine, the second $1,000 would be collected “by action of debt” – that is, seizure of property and/or any other asset the person might possess.

We posted about the FSA four years ago, in September 2017 in “The 2017 Fugitive Slave Act”; that time, we were comparing it to laws making it criminal to help immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally, and turning police officers into “immigrant-catchers” just like the slave commissioners were “slave-catchers”. When you are rewarded for doing something, you will find ways to do it. When you are punished for doing something, you’ll stop. That’s how these acts work.

This September, in Part 1 of a short series, we’re comparing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to the 2021 Texas Senate Bill 8. Why? Because this Bill, now law, makes it illegal for a woman to get an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy in the state of Texas, and therefore illegal for anyone to provide an abortion or, crucially, to help a woman to get an abortion in Texas after six weeks in any way. Abortion is realistically banned by this procedure, not just or primarily because not all women know that they are pregnant at just six weeks, but because

–all women are forced to make two appointments with an abortion provider, one to get an ultrasound so they can be shown their “baby” and told that they will be “murdering” it if they get an abortion, and one to get another ultrasound before the procedure;

–women under age 18 are forced to get written and signed parental approval to get an abortion; and

–only women with strong support systems, money, and flexible employers who allow time off are able to travel out of Texas to a state that does provide abortions after six weeks.

With the passage of this bill into law, it’s not just illegal to perform an abortion; it’s also illegal to drive a woman out of state to get one elsewhere, to pay for one, or, potentially, to tell a woman where she can get an abortion after six weeks. The law is purposefully vague, using the phrase “conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion” to cover just about anything.

Let’s do a close reading. We took the text of this Bill from the website Texas Legislature Online, which is part of the official State of Texas government website. We’re not reproducing the entire text, but letting you know which sections we’re looking at.

AN ACT
relating to abortion, including abortions after detection of an unborn child’s heartbeat; authorizing a private civil right of action.
BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF TEXAS: SECTION 1. This Act shall be known as the Texas Heartbeat Act.

–The use of the word “child” is already a red flag for subjectivity. A fetus at 6 weeks is a fetus, not a “child”. Anti-choice advocates have long used the words “baby” or “child” to describe something that could one day be a baby or child, but currently is not. From the moment an egg is fertilized by sperm, it’s a “baby”, as Section 171.201 (5) says: “‘Pregnancy’ means the human female reproductive condition that: (A) begins with fertilization”.

Calling the Bill the “Texas Heartbeat Act” technically refers to the fact that a fetal heartbeat is detected between 3-6 weeks after fertilization. But even the language of this Bill in Section 171.201 (1) reveals what a technicality this is: “‘Fetal heartbeat’ means cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart within the gestational sac.” Is this what anti-choice advocates want you to think of when you hear “Texas Heartbeat Act”? No; they want you to think of a valentine-shaped heart that represents a baby with feelings and emotions.

Basically, calling a 6-week old fetus a “child” or “baby” is like calling someone you enslave a “laborer” or “worker”, as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 did, consistently calling people who escaped slavery “fugitives from labor.”

Sec. 171.207. LIMITATIONS ON PUBLIC ENFORCEMENT. (a) Notwithstanding Section 171.005 or any other law, the requirements of this subchapter shall be enforced exclusively through the private civil actions described in Section 171.208. No enforcement of this subchapter, and no enforcement of Chapters 19 and 22, Penal Code, in response to violations of this subchapter, may be taken or threatened by this state, a political subdivision, a district or county attorney, or an executive or administrative officer or employee of this state or a political subdivision against any person, except as provided in Section 171.208.

–Here the Bill leads early with its key component: it’s not being enforced by the State government. No enforcement of the Bill may be taken or threatened by anyone representing the state. Here’s the first part of that following section they refer to:

Sec. 171.208. CIVIL LIABILITY FOR VIOLATION OR AIDING OR ABETTING VIOLATION. (a) Any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state, may bring a civil action against any person who:

–Texas never claimed that this Bill is constitutional. The evil genius of it is that it doesn’t have to be constitutional if the state is not carrying it out. No one working for the state government of Texas will be asked to prevent a woman from getting an abortion, or take anyone to court for having an abortion or helping a woman to get one. The state’s hands are off. It’s private citizens who will do this work. Yes, they’re authorized by state law, but this means that anyone who wants to challenge this law will have to go after every individual citizen who acts on it–which could be thousands or tens of thousands of people. No one can sue the State of Texas over it.

Pro-choice advocates will certainly take the first private citizen who acts on this law to court, and hope to work that individual case up to the Supreme Court, just like Brown v. Board of Education or Plessy v. Ferguson. But in the meantime, unknown numbers of people will continue to act on it–far greater numbers than work in Texas state government. 25 million people live in Texas. Far fewer work in state government.

This is an authorization of vigilantism, as we will see. Let’s continue that last section:

Sec. 171.208.  CIVIL LIABILITY FOR VIOLATION OR AIDING OR ABETTING VIOLATION. (a)  Any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state, may bring a civil action against any person who:
(1)  performs or induces an abortion in violation of this subchapter;
(2)  knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion, including paying for or reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance or otherwise, if the abortion is performed or induced in violation of this subchapter, regardless of whether the person knew or should have known that the abortion would be performed or induced in violation of this subchapter;

(1) is clear: no abortions can be provided after six weeks. (2) is that horribly vague “conduct that aids or abets the performance” of an abortion that could cover anything. The only specific they give is that insurance companies that pay for abortion can be sued. The vanishingly small number of insurance companies that ever cover abortion will soon, one fears, be reduced to zero.

You may be asking at this point, where is the burden of proof? How can anyone prove that someone “aided or abetted” in an abortion in any way? It’s just hearsay–I can go to court and say “I know that Person A drove Person B to get an abortion” or, worse, “I know that Person A encouraged Person B to get an abortion,” or even “Person A knew that when Person B left the house that day they were going to drive out of state to get an abortion and didn’t try to stop them.” There’s no end to the dystopian nightmare that is made possible here.

This law also makes someone guilty until proven innocent, which is the opposite of the legal principle the U.S. is founded on. If Person A is sued, they are forced to appear in court and argue that they are innocent. The Bill refers to someone in this situation as the “defendant” and the person who sued them as “the claimant”, and never was the word “claim” so accurately and awfully used. No one making a claim against someone will be thrown out of court, and every groundless case will have to be heard–and the “defendant” will pay all the legal fees if they are found guilty, and the state will pay all the legal fees if they are not, as we see here:

[3] (b)  If a claimant prevails in an action brought under this section, the court shall award:
(1)  injunctive relief sufficient to prevent the defendant from violating this subchapter or engaging in acts that aid or abet violations of this subchapter;
(2)  statutory damages in an amount of not less than $10,000 for each abortion that the defendant performed or induced in violation of this subchapter, and for each abortion performed or induced in violation of this subchapter that the defendant aided or abetted; and
(3)  costs and attorney’s fees.

So if Person X takes Person A to court and wins, Person A is first made incapable of repeating their crime (“injunctive relief” is a court order that demands that someone stop doing something), and Person X, the Claimant, gets “not less than” $10,000 for each abortion performed or “aided and abetted” by Person A, and the court will pay for Person X’s court costs and attorney’s fees. Person X, of course, pays their own costs and fees.

Remember how the Fugitive Slave Act guaranteed $1,000 to anyone who turned in someone hindering a slave commissioner? And put the hinderer in jail, and made them pay another $1,000 so they couldn’t do it again (injunctive relief)? Just add a zero to the Texas law and we’ve got the same situation, except that in 1850 the person found guilty paid the reward to the person who had turned them in. Now, it’s all taxpayers in Texas. Everyone, regardless of their stance on abortion, is helping to prosecute people who provide or “aid and abet” abortion.

(d) Notwithstanding Chapter 16, Civil Practice and Remedies Code, or any other law, a person may bring an action under this section not later than the fourth anniversary of the date the cause of action accrues.

–There’s a statute of limitations of four years on suing someone for providing, aiding or abetting abortion. We’re surprised it’s that short. Why fear that memory or hearsay or “claims” will be harder to prove with passage of time? Concerns about proof don’t seem to trouble anyone who wrote or passed this Bill.

Sec. 171.212. SEVERABILITY.
(c) The legislature further declares that it would have enacted this chapter, and each provision, section, subsection, sentence, clause, phrase, or word, and all constitutional applications of this chapter, irrespective of the fact that any provision, section, subsection, sentence, clause, phrase, or word, or applications of this chapter, were to be declared unconstitutional or to represent an undue burden.

–This is surprisingly frank. The Texas state legislature would have passed last word of this bill, “irrespective of the fact” that any part of it “were to be declared unconstitutional or to represent an undue burden.”

Part of this lack of concern for constitutional law comes from their deviant removal of enforcement from the state to the private citizen–again, it doesn’t matter if the law is unconstitutional if the state is not carrying it out (even though the state is, of course, carrying it out by allowing cases to be heard and punishing the courts if they don’t hear the cases).

But the larger part is that this is meant to be read as a brave, moral stand against the immorality of abortion. Even if the whole world tells us we’re wrong, the lawmakers say, we know that we’re right, and we stand by it. This wrapping oneself in morality is very selective in the U.S., and seems mostly to occur when right-wing politicians go against something liberal politicians support.

It’s also almost always about life-or-death stands that are fairly meaningless: support our troops by funding weapons and wars, because they’re fighting for our freedom… but don’t give military personnel a living wage, safety from rape and/or abuse based on sexuality, good life and health insurance, easy access to quality mental or physical health care, or good housing.

Here, it’s don’t “kill” an unborn “child” because that’s “murder”… but once that child is born, do nothing to fund early childhood education, school breakfasts, mother and infant health care, affordable and safe day care, after-school programs, or anything else that will help that child live a good life. This is not being “pro-life” but “pro-birth”.

People who ban abortion are almost always “pro-birth”. They want huge governmental involvement, investment, and protection for stopping abortion, and zero of the above for helping all children thrive, regardless of race, religion, first language, income, sex, sexuality, etc. They usually follow pro-birth laws with measures designed to prevent exactly that kind of level playing field for the children they insist be born, from segregated schools to gay “conversion camps” (aka torture centers).

There’s no room for this in a democratic nation. The history of the United States is one of incrementally increasing democracy, of getting closer to liberty and justice for all. Making a Christian position against abortion the law for all Texans, and, one day, for all Americans, is a violation of our founding principle of separation of church and state. Un-American oppression and disregard for the Constitution, vigilantism and sexism, have no place in our nation. Religious belief is not protected by the Constitution, as we’ve noted before:

…What the First Amendment does regarding religion is: first, it forbids our federal legislature from making any laws creating an official state religion; second, it forbids our federal legislature from preventing people from worshipping as they see fit. That’s what “free exercise” means–how you worship. Whether you go to a church, synagogue, mosque, or have a prayer room in your home, you are protected. If you wear a head covering like a yarmulke or turban as a form of worship, you are protected.
The First Amendment is all about physical forms of religious worship. It comes from a time when people would burn Catholic churches or refuse to let Jewish Americans build synagogues. It stops this, and stops schools from forbidding students to wear religious clothing.
It does not protect religion itself, or as we usually put it, religious belief. It does not protect anyone’s right to believe certain things. If one’s religion prohibits homosexuality or birth control, that is a belief, not a form of worship. Belief is not protected because belief is so amorphous. One could claim any crazy notion as a religious belief and demand that it be protected. We could say that our religion says women shouldn’t ride public transportation, or men should not be allowed to use public showers, or cats can’t be kept as pets, and we would have to be accommodated.
The Founders were wise enough not to get into religious belief. They just made a safe space for public and private physical worship.

Laws like the ones passed in Texas, and getting closer to passage in many other states, define one specific version of Christianity as “religious belief”, and seek to make it the state (and national) religion. That’s not what we’re supposed to do in America.

Next time, details of how the law is playing out in Texas–and beyond–and a primer in why these anti-choice laws are unconstitutional.

New Hampshire bill would ban diversity training

These grim updates have become part of the routine here at the HP–yet another state is pushing a bill through its legislature to stop the monstrous threat to democracy that is… democracy.

If you’re wondering why we will once again give you links to all the previous posts on this topic in this post, it’s to show the growing number of dominos falling over a very short time.

So here we go: this thread began with our short series examining the Biden Administration’s January 20, 2021 Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, which you can find here on the official White House site.

On March 18 we wrote about the Iowa state legislature working to incorporate the anti-justice language and intent of the Trump Executive Order 13950 of September 22, 2020 (Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping), which we spilled so much ink on late last year. The University of Iowa is being pressured by the state legislature to end diversity education for students and staff.

Then on March 23 we posted about the Idaho state legislature attempting to do the same. Then, just over a month later came the terrible update: they did. On April 29 the Idaho House approved legislation aimed at preventing public and charter schools and universities from teaching critical race theory, which examines the ways in which race and racism influence American politics, culture and the law.

And now? New Hampshire, whose House Bill HB544–“An Act relative to the propagation of divisive concepts”–is yet another move to make teaching Americans about racism illegal. As the Chronicle of Higher Education describes it, HB544

…would ban teaching or training students to “adopt or believe” a list of “divisive concepts,” including that the state or the nation is fundamentally racist or sexist. One of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Keith Ammon, a Republican, told fellow lawmakers in February that it is meant to take on “critical race theory.” He likened diversity and inclusion trainers to “snake-oil salesmen.” They propose a cure to disease, he said, but the cure is “making it worse.”
Ammon’s reasoning is emblematic. Republican lawmakers across the country have declared war on an academic concept, and — according to scholars of the theory — reduced a dynamic school of thought to a poorly drawn caricature. They’ve introduced similar bills in at least a dozen states meant to curb what they see as the pernicious influence of critical race theory in public institutions.
Republican lawmakers have long been frustrated with higher ed’s liberal tilt and its supposed quashing of conservative viewpoints.
Now, they’re taking a new tack: Instead of resolutions and bills to protect the speech of visitors on the campus quad, the recent wave of legislation often steps into the classroom to restrict what can be taught. It’s part of a larger battle playing out in state houses, schools, and the media between dueling versions of American history. Over the past few months, lawmakers like Ammon have wielded references to the decades-old theory as they argue with their colleagues about whether racism persists and if it exists at all outside of the hearts and minds of individuals.

We’ve said so much about this in the posts linked above. Teaching people that racism exists, now, today, not just safely in the past where it’s no one’s fault today (sort of–white people still benefit from that past racism), is not, in itself, racism. It’s not a lie. Only a party that has removed its own members from seats of power for refusing to support the lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent–that Biden’s win was a lie–would dare to say that teaching Americans about racism should be made illegal because it’s just not (or is no longer) true.

This isn’t about belief. This is now about law. Teachers in the states that pass these laws will be criminally liable if they teach about racism in an accurate way. They could potentially face jail time. It would be illegal to teach our history.

This is just another version of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which we describe here:

We learn about the FSA when we learn about the Compromise of 1850, of which it was a part. To pacify proslavery forces who were angry that California was allowed to enter the Union as a free state, the Compromise allowed slaveholding and trading to continue in Washington, DC, and upheld the “rights” of slaveholders to their “property”—enslaved people—throughout the Union.
This meant that if you lived in, say, Wisconsin, and had voted to pass personal liberty laws in your state outlawing slavery, those laws were overturned. Slavery would be upheld in “free” states, because slaveholders were allowed to enter free states and reclaim escaped people, and even pick up black citizens who had never been enslaved—the word of the slaveholder was accepted over the word of the black citizen and even the white citizens of the state. Whites were forced by the law to help slave-catchers, they were fined and jailed for failing to do so, or for helping an escapee, and whites were forced to live with the rescinding of the personal liberty laws they had voted for on a state level. Thus, slavery was basically enforced in every state of the Union, and outrage over this was expressed by many Northerners who had previously been publicly neutral about slavery.
If the Fugitive Slave Act was all about enslaved blacks, asked Northerners, why was it fining, jailing, and threatening free whites? Why did it seem to focus just as much on attacking the liberties of northern white citizens as it did on preventing black Americans from gaining their liberty? It was just another example of the slave power perverting democracy and threatening free government.

Americans who want to teach our actual history are now coerced and threatened with jail time into teaching a fake history that is about validating white Americans, locating all racism in those whites who enslaved black Americans and created institutional racism after slavery was ended (i.e., white Americans in the past) and thus relegating racism to the past. In this way, they are forced to support racism.

The problem with this that we haven’t yet addressed in our many posts is that American history is already usually taught so badly, leaving out so much of the reality of slavery and racism in our nation, that laws like this are almost unnecessary. Here’s an article that lays this out quite well, from the New Hampshire Business Review. But these laws ensure that our history teaching and textbooks will get worse and worse, thus allowing racism today and in the future to flourish in a medium of complete denial of the fact that racism has been a primary cause of a great deal of legislation, settlement and housing patterns, industrial growth, wealth creation, and other “race-neutral” economic and socio-political actions that are taught in American history courses.

Teaching all of these without mentioning racism will create a history of America that is so cartoonish it will effectively kill American history. Which is, we believe, the goal.

We do believe as well that not all Americans will accept this, and that the possibility of fighting it is real. But to have a bloody war created for us over race, once again, once again… it’s infuriating and the harm it causes from the level of the individual soul to the fate of the planet is breathtaking.

If you live in a state considering such legislation, take action. If your state has not yet introduced such legislation, investigate to make sure no one is planning to. If you’re a teacher, support your colleagues who stand against this legislation. As the NHBR article says, to be better than this we have to be brave.

The 2017 Fugitive Immigrant Act

We’re interrupting our series on Barack Obama’s Farewell Address once again, but this time not because it was removed from whitehouse.gov, along with pages on civil rights, healthcare, and climate science, by the Trump Administration. Instead, we are struck by how much the war on Latin American immigrants (and this one group is the real focus of anti-immigrant activism in this country) reminds us of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (also known as the Fugitive Slave Law).

We learn about the FSA when we learn about the Compromise of 1850, of which it was a part. To pacify proslavery forces who were angry that California was allowed to enter the Union as a free state, the Compromise allowed slaveholding and trading to continue in Washington, DC, and upheld the “rights” of slaveholders to their “property”—enslaved people—throughout the Union.

This meant that if you lived in, say, Wisconsin, and had voted to pass personal liberty laws in your state outlawing slavery, those laws were overturned. Slavery would be upheld in “free” states, because slaveholders were allowed to enter free states and reclaim escaped people, and even pick up black citizens who had never been enslaved—the word of the slaveholder was accepted over the word of the black citizen and even the white citizens of the state. Whites were forced by the law to help slave-catchers, they were fined and jailed for failing to do so, or for helping an escapee, and whites were forced to live with the rescinding of the personal liberty laws they had voted for on a state level. Thus, slavery was basically enforced in every state of the Union, and outrage over this was expressed by many Northerners who had previously been publicly neutral about slavery.

If the Fugitive Slave Act was all about black slaves, asked Northerners, why was it fining, jailing, and threatening free whites? Why did it seem to focus just as much on attacking the liberties of northern white citizens as it did on preventing black Americans from gaining their liberty? It was just another example of the slave power perverting democracy and threatening free government.

When we hear people today, in 2017, talking about the laws and acts they are going to put in place to stop the alleged democracy-killing overflow of Spanish-speaking immigration to the United States, they sound a lot like people who would have liked the Fugitive Slave Act. Here is an NPR interview with Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents U.S. Border Patrol agents, the National Border Patrol Council, which endorsed Trump during the campaign, from yesterday:

INSKEEP: What do you think about the president’s effort to compel, if he can, local and state authorities to be more helpful to the Border Patrol and immigration authorities in doing their jobs and rounding up people who are here illegally?

JUDD: Well – so my understanding is that he’s not compelling them to help us round them up. But what he is saying is if they come in contact, if a police officer, say, from Phoenix Police Department – if a police officer from the Phoenix, Ariz., police department comes in contact with somebody that he knows is here or suspects that is here illegally, then his responsibility is to contact an immigration enforcement officer to come in and find out. It’s the same with me. As a Border Patrol agent, if I make a vehicle stop and I find that illegal activity is taking place outside of the laws that I enforce…

INSKEEP: Drunk driver for example.

JUDD: Exactly – it’s my responsibility to call the local law – the local law enforcement so that they can come out and take care of the problem.

INSKEEP: Are we not actually arguing about that much then? Because there are local authorities who are saying, yeah, yeah, if we find somebody who’s obviously in violation, we have to turn them over, but we do not want to make that our job. We don’t want it to be our job to seek them out or to hold people when otherwise there would not be reason to hold them.

JUDD: And it’s not going to be their job. It’s not going to be their job to go seek out illegal immigrants in the United States. That is immigrations officers’ jobs and it’s not theirs. But if they do come in contact with people that are in the country illegally, they should have a responsibility and duty to report people that are breaking the law.

Judd’s statements are disingenuous. How would that police office in Phoenix “know” that someone he meets is “here illegally” without a mechanism in place to track all immigrants and make their data available at all times to police, and require the police to consult it? There’s no way to “know” someone is a legal immigrant or not without looking up their information, which means asking/forcing the person you have “come in contact with” to give you their name, address, etc. And of course, “come in contact” with is blandly disingenuous as well: when do police officers “come in contact” with people? We’d wager that 95% of the time it’s by stopping them on the premise of a violation of the law. Judd himself puts contact in the context of a vehicle stop. So already we have a question of who is being stopped and why which has, of course, been asked for over a century in this country, beginning with black Americans stopped by police for no reason and extending to brown immigrants getting the same treatment.

The reporter’s characterization of police officers resisting being turned into immigrant-catchers is in line with all white Americans being forced into being slave-catchers in 1850. Judd says it won’t be the police officer’s job to “seek out illegal immigrants”, but reiterates that police officers who don’t turn in people who are here illegally are violating their duty and the law. If you get in trouble for failing to do something, you will find ways to do it. If police officers will be sanctioned for failing to turn in illegal immigrants, they will begin turning in illegal immigrants. They will look at the data, identify people here illegally in their cities and towns, stop them on another pretext, and turn them in.

And if the police must do this, eventually they will enlist the general public in helping them to do this. They will paint all immigrants here illegally as murderers, as Judd does later in the interview by saying “I think the country is going to be a lot safer. I really do, yes, absolutely. I mean, I was there with what they call the angel families, families that had children that were killed by persons that were in the United States illegally.” And once all illegal immigrants are child-murderers, it will be against the law not to seek them out and turn them in, for everyone.

And then we are all slave-catchers.