Over the last year, Texas Republicans have enacted sweeping regulatory and legal changes that have upended all facets of life for noncitizens. The state has limited who can get an occupational license; register or buy a car; obtain commercial driver’s licenses; and get in-state tuition at colleges and universities.
The changes are wreaking havoc on the 1.7 million people without documentation in Texas, as well as tens of thousands of refugees and people with temporary protected status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Already, more than 6,400 refugees and DACA recipients have lost their commercial driver’s licenses. Many more noncitizens are expected to lose the ability to work in licensed industries from construction and medicine to air conditioning and cosmetology.
The complicated patchwork of new rules has led to widespread fear and uncertainty, immigration attorneys and advocates say.
“These all represent a broader and more coordinated shift … to create a pipeline of exclusion that stretches from limiting access to K-12 education, all the way into participation in the workforce and basic mobility through the state,” said Corinne Kentor with the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.
For many Republican elected officials, that’s the point. The party that once scorned the idea of mass deportations and worked to ensure undocumented students could access higher education has now begun digging through decades of law and policy to undo benefits and services that made Texas hospitable to noncitizens.
The Biden-era immigration surge, President Donald Trump’s brazen immigration crackdown and a contentious election season are pushing state leaders to pursue policies once seen as too extreme within the party. And there’s more to come: Some Texas elected officials want to take aim next at Plyler v. Doe, a landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that requires public schools to educate undocumented students.
“Benefits, licenses, and taxpayer-funded services should not be used to incentivize unlawful presence at the expense of hardworking Texans,” Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott , said in a statement. “These steps ensure compliance with federal law, protect the integrity of our systems, and prioritize jobs and resources for legal residents and citizens.”
These changes are happening outside the typical legislative process, contributing to confusion even within the agencies responsible for implementation. For Democratic lawmakers who successfully held off many of these proposals during the session, this sudden deluge of executive branch actions during the interim has been frustrating.
“The governor is legislating through rulemaking,” Rep. Ramon Romero , D-Fort Worth, said. “We are an equal branch of government, and it’s just completely disingenuous for anyone that swears to the Constitution, swears that oath, and then just goes around it.”
A parade of changes When a bill aiming to revoke in-state tuition from undocumented college students stalled out last session, immigration advocates thought this meant the 2001 law would remain safe for at least the next two years.
But just days after the Legislature gaveled out, Attorney General Ken Paxton took matters into his own hands, working with the Department of Justice to get the courts to overturn the law. Students are now required to show they are “lawfully present” in the country to get in-state tuition, imperiling higher education access for potentially as many as 18,500 students who had previously been covered by the program. Some universities have incorrectly told DACA recipients they no longer qualify, even after receiving guidance from the state, which arrived months after the ruling and did little to quell the confusion .
GOP lawmakers who had been frustrated by the bill’s failure rejoiced, with one calling it a step toward ensuring “every Texas tax dollar is deployed for the greatest benefit.”
In the 10 months since the regular legislative session concluded, Paxton, Abbott and various agencies led by the governor’s appointees have remained busy working the legal and regulatory system to eliminate services and benefits for noncitizens.
In September, Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety to strictly enforce a federal English proficiency requirement for truck drivers, and ordered the agency to stop issuing commercial driver’s licenses for non-English speakers. DPS said it “took enforcement action” against more than 400 drivers, most of whom were licensed in Mexico, as a result.
Soon after, the agency said it would no longer issue or renew commercial driver’s licenses for DACA recipients, refugees and people with asylum. This came after the Trump administration issued a similar policy at the national level, which was temporarily blocked by a federal court for failing to “articulate a satisfactory explanation for how the rule would promote safety.”
Republican officials point to a small number of high-profile crashes involving drivers without permanent residency, including a wreck in Austin that left five dead last March. Federal officials launched a nationwide audit in the wake of that crash, after which DPS revoked commercial licenses from more than 6,000 drivers, according to an agency spokesperson.
The Department of Motor Vehicles also added stricter photo identification requirements for registering and purchasing a car, after state Rep. Brian Harrison , R-Midlothian, called on the agency to enhance its oversight.
“The Texas government should be a force multiplier of President Trump’s efforts to combat illegal immigration, not enabling or incentivizing it,” Harrison, one of the Legislature’s rightmost members , wrote on social media in November, when the agency made the change. “It is past time the Texas government starts acting like we are in a battle for the future of western civilization, because we are.”
Harrison alleged undocumented drivers had driven up car insurance premiums and made the roads more dangerous. But at a legislative hearing, people representing small businesses, industry groups, county tax assessor offices and advocacy organizations testified that these stricter requirements would actually increase the number of unregistered, uninsured drivers, having the same effect that Harrison feared.
Car dealership owners, especially those who serve predominantly Hispanic communities, are seeing declining business now that customers must provide identification that proves they are in the country legally before they can buy a car, said Pablo Higueros, the president of Texas United Auto and Community Alliance, a coalition of car dealership owners, insurance agents and tax collectors.
Many potential customers are traveling out of state to buy and register their car, he said. Others are being forced to drive unregistered cars to get to work or school, increasing the risk that they’ll be pulled over and potentially face deportation, especially as state and local police work with federal immigration authorities.
“The state in a way got really smart,” Higueros said. “Now when a cop stops you (for driving an unregistered vehicle), they do have probable cause to arrest you and there’s no way we can fight it.”
Most recently, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation voted to sharply limit which types of noncitizens can be licensed for a wide range of jobs, from electricians to speech pathologists and dog breeders. Most noncitizens will not be able to obtain an occupational license unless they have a green card, are granted asylum or refugee status, or are recognized as a victim of human trafficking; DACA recipients will be ineligible for licenses.
Lorena Chavarría, a social worker and advocate for domestic violence survivors, founded DACS Academy, the first Spanish-language cosmetology school in Austin. The school, an acronym for Dios Abriendo Caminos De Superación, or God Opening Paths to Overcoming, helps women, many of whom are undocumented and facing domestic violence, get trained, licensed and working.
“Individuals who, through our program, were able to leave environments of violence or hardship are now at risk of returning to cycles of instability, economic dependence and even extreme lethargy,” Chavarría, speaking through her daughter, told agency commissioners at a public hearing earlier this month. “This situation affects not only individuals but entire families. Behind every student there are children, households, and dreams that depend on this opportunity to move forward.”
Rules and regulations Before becoming general counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens, Gloria Leal worked as a lawyer for state agencies, including the Texas attorney general’s office. While agencies typically make new rules in response to laws passed by the Legislature, these recent changes seem unusually “self-generated,” she said.
“There’s a [legislative] process to make sure that whatever comes out meets the will of the people, and the representatives who represent us,” she said. “This just eliminates that, and you have to wonder, why? What’s the urgency?”
Romero, chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, said many of the recent changes were first filed as bills by legislators, but they didn’t have the votes to pass through the Republican-dominated chambers.
“Most Republicans understand where our workforce is coming from,” Romero, who works in the construction industry, said. “They don’t want people driving without registered vehicles, which means more uninsured motorists and higher insurance costs. They don’t want property prices going up because the labor is that much more expensive.”
Romero said Abbott is overstepping Texas’ traditionally weak governor role in helping to usher in these changes outside the legislative process.
All proposed agency rules must be run by Abbott before they are made public, after a directive he issued in 2018 gave him more oversight of these executive branch entities.
In the years since, Abbott has continued to consolidate power by appointing scores of allies to an enormous range of agency boards and commissions. Six of the seven members on the commission that approved the occupational licensing change were initially appointed by Abbott. All nine members of the board that approved the car registration rule were appointed by him.
“Apparently whoever’s in power gets to abuse that power,” said Jim Harrington, a longtime constitutional law professor and founder of the left-leaning Texas Civil Rights Project. “We’re not gonna abide by the way our government is structured or the way that it has operated in the past. If we have the power, we’re gonna do it the way we want to do it.”
Mahaleris, Abbott’s spokesperson, said the governor would “continue using every necessary tool to deter illegal immigration and keep Texas a law-and-order state.”
These rapid fire changes have left advocates bracing for what might come next — even with the Legislature out for another nine months. Recently, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller grilled Texas GOP lawmakers on why they hadn’t yet passed a law to challenge Plyler v. Doe, the decision guaranteeing public education for undocumented students.
But as with the other recent changes, upending Plyler may require legal or regulatory action outside the Capitol. One GOP official with knowledge of what was discussed at the White House meeting suggested the Legislature wasn’t ready to pass a bill to challenge Plyler.
“Nobody in the mainstream of the Republican caucus wants to take away educational opportunities from the children of illegal immigrants, who through no fault to their own were brought into the United States,” said the Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. “What we would prefer is for the federal government to deport the family, or, if they don’t, then pay for the education.”
— Renzo Downey contributed to this report.
