AUSTIN – Soon after Gov. Greg Abbott enacted Senate Bill 4 in May, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Austin, asking that the so-called sanctuary cities law be declared constitutional.
Now, for the second time in a week, the law, which has yet to go into effect, was debated in a federal court.
The hourlong hearing began with federal Judge Sam Sparks saying he didn’t have “the authority to forecast the future.”
Sparks said he believed the state would have no facts or evidence to show how the state would be harmed because the law won’t take effect until Sept. 1.
The state’s attorney, however, said the state had to make a preemptive move ahead of expected lawsuits challenging the law. Since then, several pending lawsuits, from the small town of El Cenizo to every major city in Texas, have been consolidated in federal Judge Orlando Garcia’s court in San Antonio.
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Renae Hicks, an Austin attorney helping represent El Cenizo, the state’s oldest and smallest self-declared sanctuary city, said Sparks did not sound convinced he had jurisdiction.
Hicks said the judge seemed to be asking why the state “was trying to bring a case up here to Austin that’s already a real case in San Antonio.”
Thursday’s hearing in Austin, just blocks away from where the law was signed, followed the first hearing on Monday. LULAC asked Judge Garcia for a preliminary injunction to stop the law from going into effect at least for now.
READ MORE: Lawsuit filed on behalf of San Antonio against sanctuary cities ban
The San Antonio judge is expected to rule sometime before that happens, while it’s expected Sparks will issue an order relatively soon, since he has a monthlong case scheduled in August.
The state also argued that since it was the first to file ahead of El Cenizo, San Antonio isn’t the proper venue for the case.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler, said he would prefer all the lawsuits be heard in San Antonio.
Besides for the sake of efficiency, Adler said, “The most important thing is we’re moving out of the political, rhetorical forum we had in the legislature, in a place where facts and law are going to control.”
Yet that’s why the state argued it filed its complaint in Austin because that’s where SB4 was adopted by the Texas Legislature.
The state also asked that the pending claims be dismissed, but Jose Garza, an attorney representing the city and county of El Paso, said, it would be “An attempt to stop free speech, stop people from having an opinion about SB4."
Thursday’s hearing also touched on the voluntary detainers that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement places on jail inmates if it’s believed they are in the country illegally.
Judge Sparks said detainers have worked well over many years, but now the state wants to require local jails to comply under the sanctuary cities law.
An attorney representing Travis County told the court that the detainers should be accompanied with warrants and affidavits detailing the probable cause for detaining the inmate.
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