Statement: Gov. Abbott Continues Texas Tradition of Building Political Career by Criminalizing and Caging Latinx Immigrants
For Immediate Release
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Contact:
Elianne Ramos | Chief Communications Officer | [email protected] | 212-739-7513
Sarai Bejarano | Manager of Traditional & Digital Media | [email protected] | 212-739-7581
LatinoJustice Statement on Gov. Abbot’s Decision to Empty Jail to House Immigrants
Gov. Abbott Continues Texas Tradition of Building Political Career by Criminalizing and Caging Latinx Immigrants
Austin, TX – On Thursday, June 17th, 2021Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered inmates from a south Texas prison to be moved to empty the jail to house immigrant at the border.
The following is a statement on Governor Abbott’s decision issued by LatinoJustice’s National Criminal Justice Director and Director of the Southwest Region, Jorge Antonio Renaud:
Seven months after the voters rejected Donald Trump’s campaign to demonize immigrants, Governor Greg Abbott staking his career on bringing it back. His “Operation Lone Star” is pure racial profiling: Latinx immigrants are being arrested and imprisoned for minor crimes that do not result in jail time when committed by white people. As part of that profiling, Briscoe Unit—a state prison, not a jail—will be used to imprison people accused of low-level crimes simply because they are Latinx immigrants, arrested for crossing the border and charged with spurious crimes, without due process, all in the service of Abbott furthering a political career foundering because of his shocking mishandling of this year’s snowstorm, which left more than 150 Texans dead.
Under the cover of an imagined crisis on the Texas-Mexican border, Abbott recently conceived of Operation Lone Star, vowing to “surge the resources and law enforcement personnel needed to confront this crisis.” The governor has employed the Department of Public Safety, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, and Texas’ in-prison school Windham School District to try and provide a patina of respectability to his latest attacks on immigrants.
Gov. Abbott has not only taken the unprecedented step of ordering a Texas prison to shift its population elsewhere in a state prison system struggling with staff shortages and failing infrastructure – he has taken $250 million of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s biennial budget to build the border wall upon which his mentor built his political career. This is a quarter of a billion dollars taken from a system that could not find funds for temperature control systems that would prevent heat-related deaths and has bitterly fought against air-conditioning its prisons despite escalating deaths of both staff and incarcerated individuals due to soaring Texas temperatures.
Gov. Abbot is grasping at straws to resurrect his political career, and he is doing so on the backs of Latinx immigrants and incarcerated individuals. Abbott is continuing the centuries-old pattern of criminalizing immigrants, especially immigrants of color, expecting the Latinx communities of Texas to accept his behavior as ‘just politics’.
LatinoJustice condemns Gov. Abbott’s actions as entirely unnecessary, racist, and politically motivated. We will join our allies and take whatever actions are necessary to ensure that individuals are not put into cages for their desire to improve their lives and cross an imaginary border.
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About LatinoJustice
LatinoJustice PRLDEF works to create a more just society by using and challenging the rule of law to secure transformative, equitable and accessible justice, by empowering our community and by fostering leadership through advocacy and education. For more than 40 years, LatinoJustice PRLDEF has acted as an advocate against injustices throughout New York and beyond. To learn more about LatinoJustice, visit www.latinojustice.org.