Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

A Senate committee took up a sweeping House homeland security measure Monday, with a border senator saying members could support it but warning that the bill should not seek to enforce immigration law.

“If your goal is to deal in a tactical way with the rise of vicious drug cartels on the border, we are all 100 percent with you,” Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, told the bill’s sponsor in the House, Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas.

But Shapleigh said later, “if the goal is to create a Texas border patrol and to target immigration as a goal, you’re going to get a lot of resistance from me and almost everyone on the border.”

Swinford, chairman of the House State Affairs Committee, sought to assure members of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee that was not the intent of his legislation, House Bill 13.

“Everybody thinks this bill is something it isn’t,” Swinford said. “It’s not an immigration bill, it’s a border security bill.”

House Bill 13 gives Gov. Rick Perry’s homeland security office broad control of homeland and border security operations and the final say on deciding how more than $100 million for border security will be spent.

The homeland security office would direct state money, and potentially millions more in federal funding, at border sheriffs to fight criminal gangs trafficking humans and drugs. Perry has said the money would continue the work of previous state border initiatives.

Shapleigh agreed with Swinford that Colombian and Mexican drug organizations have taken control of major border corridors to distribute drugs throughout the state.

But he said that allowing state and local law enforcement powers to enforce immigration laws could create constitutional issues.

“When immigration enforcement takes place along the border, the question is what is probable cause, and if walking while brown is probable cause to making a stop on the border, you are going to create significant civil rights issues up and down the communities in which we work,” Shapleigh said. “That is the issue we need to deal with in this bill.”

Shapleigh noted published reports that said previous state-led border security initiatives detained far more illegal immigrants than criminal gang members.

The Senate committee planned to take testimony on House Bill 13 later today. Chairman John Carona, R-Dallas, said the committee would not vote on the bill today.