Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

El Paso Mayor John Cook

AUSTIN - The seeds El Paso Mayor John Cook and the city council planted in the summer of 2006 with their Congreso on Immigration Reform bore fruit in the Texas Senate Tuesday, says a border lawmaker.

The Senate passed a committee substitute to HB 13, the main border security legislation of the session, with all provisions requiring local law enforcement to enforce federal criminal immigration laws stripped out.

Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso, said he and other senators stuck to the principles laid out in the resolution passed at the congreso and as a result produced a much fairer and inclusive border security bill.

“Way back, during U.S. Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner’s visit to El Paso, our mayor and city council held a hearing to pass a resolution on fair, comprehensive, immigration. From that day on our city took the lead with a clear vision for fair immigration,” said Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, D-El Paso.

“Now, House Bill 13 is clean. All the anti-immigrant provisions were stricken. Provisions that would have made immigration officers of every policeman in the state were taken out. Provisions that would have taxed the remittances on everything $5,000 or under being sent back to Mexico were taken out. Each of these provisions would have changed life on the border as we know it.”

Shapleigh said particular tribute for the way HB 13 turned out needed to be paid to Reps. Veronica Gonzales, D-McAllen, Jessica Farrar, D-Houston, and Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, for the work they did earlier in the process. Without their input, Shapleigh said, the Senate would have been sent a far worse bill.

The bill provides about $100 million for border security over the next two years, with much of the money going to border sheriffs. The bill also creates a border security council to decide how the money is apportioned. Gov. Rick Perry gets to appoint the council’s members.

One amendment added by Shapleigh will require border sheriffs to produce racial profiling reports. He said that was needed to counter the immigration-enforcement tactics carried out by El Paso County Sheriff Leo Samaniego last year.

Immigrant communities complained Samaniego’s deputies were raiding hotels and setting up road blocks to capture undocumented immigrants. Samaniego disputed the claims.

“If the goal of House Bill 13 is to deal with violent crime, drug dealers in these emerging corridors we are 100 percent behind the bill. If the real goal is to have a state immigration agency then that is another matter,” Shapleigh said.

Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, who carried the Senate’s version of HB 13, said he was happy to accept Shapleigh’s amendment. “This bill is about homeland security and law enforcement and not about immigration,” Carona said.

Another amendment added to HB 13 by Shapleigh will allow the Department of Public Safety to conduct a pilot program that will allow border residents to purchase “enhanced” driver’s licenses.

“If the bill is signed by the governor we can get driver’s licenses for $40 that includes citizenship information so that border citizens will be able to cross back and forth without the need for passports,” Shapleigh said.

Shapleigh said the next step for border communities would be to monitor the deliberations of the conference committee that will reconcile the differences between the House and Senate versions of HB 13.

Rep. David Swinford, R-Dumas, author of HB 13, has said he wants to keep the immigration-enforcement provisions in the bill. “We are not asking local law enforcement to do anything they are not currently required to do,” Swinford told the Guardian. “Racial profiling in an immigration bill is not our duty,”

Shapleigh said he has asked to be on the HB 13 conference committee. “I want to make sure the great work we have done on immigration does not come back to this bill,” he said.

The August 2006 congreso hosted by the City of El Paso was organized in protest at the actions of Congressmen Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, who at the time was chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

Sensenbrenner held a hearing of his committee in El Paso but would not let many local officials or border leaders speak. The title of the hearing, held at the Chamizal National Memorial, was “Should Mexico hold Veto Power over U.S. Border Security Decisions.”

The congreso included panel discussions on social justice, immigration law, and the fiscal impact of border security. Many of those attending came away saying they had heard the most moving and eloquent testimony on immigration – that given by the Rev. John Stowe, moderator of the curia at the Diocese of El Paso and a leader of the El Paso Inter-Religious Sponsoring Organization.

“What we learned at our hearing was that if we go and try do a partial fix on immigration reform, we are doing a disservice to immigrants and a disservice to our country,” Cook told the Guardian, at the end of the hearing.

“We challenged the myths about immigration with facts and real data. And we offered a resolution that tells people what the largest international city sister in the world feels about immigration issues.”

The resolution passed at the congreso was quickly adopted by cities and counties up and down the Texas-Mexico border, and by the Texas Border Coalition.

Click below for the El Paso Congreso resolution.