The Patchwork State

States are Creating their Own Immigration Enforcement Laws. What does this mean for migrant communities?

As states move to expand their role in immigration enforcement, federal agencies retreat from longstanding protections, and courts increasingly resolve disputes through emergency orders, the traditional boundaries governing immigration law are becoming less clear. This piece examines how that shift is unfolding—and what it means for constitutional accountability and migrant communities nationwide.

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In 2023, Texas enacted Senate Bill 4 (SB 4), a sweeping immigration law that authorizes state and local law enforcement to arrest individuals suspected of unlawfully entering the United States and empowers state courts to order their removal. Since its passage, the law has inspired copycat efforts in states like Florida, where proposed legislation such as SB 4-C has already triggered legal challenges and jurisdictional confusion across executive, legislative, and judicial branches, raising concerns about how consistently constitutional constraints are being applied when state political priorities come into conflict with federal law.

Immigration enforcement as a federal responsibility has been firmly established for over a century. Beginning in 1891, the federal government assumed explicit authority over the admission, documentation, and regulation of migrants, laying the groundwork for a uniform national immigration system. This centralized framework was designed to prevent exactly the kind of jurisdictional fragmentation now emerging, in which individual states assert overlapping or parallel enforcement powers.

Federal courts repeatedly intervened to block legislative efforts in Texas and Florida after determining that the measures were in violation of the Supremacy Clause. In January 2024, the Biden administration and civil rights groups sued Texas over SB 4, arguing that it unlawfully encroached on federal immigration authority; a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction the following month. Although the U.S. Supreme Court briefly allowed the law to be enforced in March 2024 while litigation continued, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals quickly reinstated the injunction in July 2025, affirming that SB 4 conflicts with federal law.

“This ruling is a critical victory not only for immigrants and their families across Florida, but for all of us who hold dear core principles of our Constitution,” said Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida. The principles invoked by Jackson reflect the Constitution’s separation of powers and the limits placed on each branch of government, including the judiciary itself. The Supreme Court, as the nation’s highest court, is traditionally tasked with resolving legal disputes through reasoned opinions grounded in precedent and constitutional interpretation. In the last two years, however, the Court has increasingly relied on emergency rulings—often issued without full briefing, oral argument, or detailed explanation—to decide consequential legal questions. In its initial handling of Florida’s SB 4-C, for example, the Court allowed the law to proceed despite lower federal courts finding it likely unconstitutional and blocking it from taking effect. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, frequently among the dissenting voices in these emergency decisions, warned in a July dissent that such rulings “undermine our constitutional system.”  That warning reflects broader concerns that the Court’s growing reliance on emergency orders fuels skepticism about its role in enforcing constitutional limits—raising questions not only about its commitment to constitutional process, but also about its institutional willingness to tell states “no” when they openly overreach.

While Texas’ SB 4 and Florida’s SB 4-C illustrate how states are increasingly asserting immigration enforcement powers traditionally reserved for the federal government, they are not isolated cases but part of a growing pattern of state-level immigration enforcement initiatives nationwide. As documented by The Marshall Project, states including Alabama, Tennessee, Idaho, and New Hampshire have implemented statutes that criminalize assistance to undocumented people, create new state-level immigration enforcement units, reclassify irregular documentation status as criminal aggravators, and abolish federally recognized "safe zones."

Rather than reinforcing uniform standards or accountability mechanisms, the Trump administration has advanced a broader project of devolving authority to the states—most visibly through its support for legal and political efforts that curtailed federal protections on issues such as reproductive rights following the rollback of Roe v. Wade and the rapid expansion of state-level anti-transgender legislation. At the same time, the administration systematically hollowed out federal agencies through staffing reductions, budget cuts, and politicized leadership, leaving oversight functions fractured or ineffective. In immigration enforcement, this fragmentation has allowed states and local jurisdictions to pursue divergent—and often more punitive—approaches with limited federal restraint.

Meanwhile, federal agencies have rolled back long-standing protections that once limited the reach of immigration enforcement. Since Trump's inauguration in January last year, there has been a rise in documented abuses, including instances of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents violently handling detainees, and mistakenly detaining U.S. citizens. In Texas, the ACLU has called for Border Patrol agents to be held directly liable in cases involving medical neglect and denial of care to detainees. The cumulative effects of these enforcement strategies have fallen especially hard on women and trans migrants. In 2025, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would no longer fully observe so-called “safe zones,” including women’s shelters and hospitals, forcing some women to choose between accessing life-saving resources and risking detention or deportation. As of January 6th, several detention centers have rescinded protection and medical aid to transgender detainees from their contracts, citing compliance with the executive order "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to The Federal Government."

The federal rollback of constitutional protections, the expansion of enforcement through private contracts, and the growing assertion of state authority together signal more than a dispute over immigration enforcement jurisdiction. They reflect a governing environment in which constitutional boundaries are increasingly tested through persistence rather than precedent, and where enforcement power expands even as institutional restraint weakens. As states continue to assert authority in an area long governed by federal law—and as courts and federal agencies struggle to reassert clear limits—the result is a system in which constitutional protections become unevenly applied, and the costs of that instability are borne most heavily by migrant communities.