This story is a part of “Trump Two: Six Months In,” our collection taking inventory of the administration’s efforts to reshape immigration enforcement and felony justice.
When Alabama lawmakers handed a sweeping anti-immigration invoice in 2011, backlash was swift. Immigrant advocates warned that Latinos had been fleeing the state, fearing arrests for his or her standing or for “harboring” undocumented individuals. And a few enterprise leaders condemned the regulation after police arrested German and Japanese automobile executives for not having their licenses on them, a follow supposed to funnel undocumented individuals from police stops into deportation proceedings.
Civil rights teams sued, and courts overturned a lot of the regulation as unconstitutional. Activists thought the trouble was behind them. However this 12 months, it’s come roaring again. In Might, Alabama established a new crime for transporting undocumented immigrants into the state.
Alabama is one among 37 states which have enacted a mixed complete of a minimum of 104 immigration-related legal guidelines in 2025, in keeping with an evaluation of knowledge from the Nationwide Convention of State Legislatures. The legal guidelines replicate a nationwide crackdown on immigration galvanized by the Trump administration, with dozens of statutes creating new restrictions and penalties round employment, voting, training, driver’s licenses, public advantages and different facets of life for non-citizens.
Republican-Led States Have Handed Most New Immigration Legal guidelines in 2025
States enacted dozens of recent immigration-related statutes in 2025 that improve policing and limit voting and ID playing cards for non-citizens.
Lawmakers are paying particular consideration to the function of state and native policing in immigration enforcement, passing a minimum of 34 legal guidelines this 12 months that encourage these businesses’ cooperation with federal authorities, criminalize assist to undocumented immigrants, create state immigration enforcement bureaus and extra. As of July, the variety of these new legal guidelines is greater than double the tally of comparable legal guidelines enacted in all of 2024.
In a minimum of 4 states — Alabama, Tennessee, Florida and Idaho — new strict anti-immigration legal guidelines are much like ones in different states that courts have already struck down for encroaching on federal immigration enforcement. However Republican lawmakers and governors, vowing help for President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, superior the payments anyway.
These legal guidelines come at a time when authorized students say the U.S. Supreme Court docket might be extra receptive to state anti-immigration statutes.
“I feel it is attainable that the Supreme Court docket is altering sufficient, or has modified sufficient when it comes to its make-up, there’s going to be extra room for state felony legal guidelines which are near federal immigration legal guidelines,” mentioned Hiroshi Motomura, a regulation professor on the College of California Los Angeles. “However who is aware of the place that line goes to be drawn.”
NCSL’s database contains payments and amendments handed into regulation with a governor’s signature and resolutions authorized by a state legislature. Its monitoring dates again to 2008, permitting for comparability of comparable legal guidelines over time.
When Frank Barragan, an organizer with the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice, realized that the state had handed a regulation mirroring one which courts had already struck down, he mentioned his “arms had been stuffed with chills… it was sickening.”
Barragan mentioned Alabama activists are making ready to help the state’s 200,000 foreign-born residents, however the challenges are higher now than they had been 14 years in the past. “We’re not combating simply the state of Alabama,” he mentioned. “We’re combating the complete administration.”
New legal guidelines handed in Tennessee and Alabama broaden the scope of immigration enforcement by focusing on people and teams that help undocumented individuals.
As of Might, charitable organizations in Tennessee that home unauthorized immigrants can be held liable if these tenants commit crimes. One other regulation permits prosecutors to cost individuals, together with U.S. residents, with felony “human smuggling” in the event that they conceal undocumented individuals from authorities for “business benefit or personal monetary achieve.”
“It’s simply principally a option to ensure that Tennessee isn’t a hospitable place for unlawful aliens,” mentioned Memphis State Sen. Brent Taylor, who co-authored each legal guidelines. “In the event that they need to function and reside on this nation, they need to discover one other state.”
Immigrant rights teams sued in June, arguing that the regulation is so broad that it criminally implicates relations and roommates of present or previously undocumented individuals, in addition to landlords, charities and homes of worship that provide migrants shelter. The regulation went into impact on July 1 and stays lively whereas authorized challenges proceed.
Taylor co-authored one other regulation going through authorized pushback. Senate Invoice 6002 permits Tennessee prosecutors to cost elected officers with felonies and face 1–6 years in jail for voting in favor of “sanctuary metropolis” insurance policies that search to guard immigrants from deportation. In an ongoing federal lawsuit, the American Civil Liberties Union mentioned that is “the primary identified occasion in American historical past the place a state has imposed felony legal responsibility on native officers merely for the point of view expressed of their votes.”
Few precedents exist for the legal guidelines handed in Tennessee and Alabama this 12 months. In a single instance from 2023, Florida amended its human smuggling statute to incorporate the transportation of immigrants missing authorized standing. An injunction on the regulation stays in place. A lawsuit has but to be filed towards Alabama’s related invoice, which fits into impact in October.
President Donald Trump excursions a migrant detention middle on the Dade-Collier Coaching and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, on July 1, 2025.
Other new legal guidelines create crimes particularly focusing on undocumented immigrants, in a method that critics say offers individuals felony information to extra simply justify their deportation.
Trump has pledged to deport “the worst of the worst,” but most individuals that ICE detains have no felony convictions. However new state legal guidelines in Florida and Idaho criminalize immigrants only for being undocumented.
Below federal regulation, coming into the nation with out authorization is a misdemeanor offense that traditionally has been not often charged. Being current within the nation with out correct documentation, together with overstaying a visa, is a civil violation fairly than against the law. Visa overstays are estimated to be the most typical type of unlawful immigration.
In March, Florida enacted Senate Invoice 4-C, which fits additional than federal regulation by creating a brand new crime for coming into the state as an undocumented individual, with a minimal penalty of 9 months in jail. A related latest regulation from Idaho establishes crimes for unlawful entry into the state and for trafficking migrants throughout the border. A federal decide blocked it in April.
Adam Cox, an immigration regulation professor at New York College, mentioned the brand new legal guidelines let police arrest undocumented individuals who have dedicated no different crime within the state. “It permits the state that the native cop is in to say, ‘Aha, there is a state crime I can now arrest you for that’s going to place you within the deportation pipeline.’”
If courts ultimately uphold these legal guidelines, it might successfully broaden the immigration enforcement community right down to beat cops on site visitors obligation.
Judges have blocked related legal guidelines in 4 different states previously two years, counting on a 2012 Supreme Court docket choice in Arizona v. United States that strengthened the authority of the federal authorities — not states — to supervise immigration enforcement. However in a newer 2020 choice, Kansas v. Garcia, the Supreme Court docket allowed Kansas to criminally cost non-citizens for submitting false tax kinds, although an analogous federal offense exists.
Civil rights teams sued Florida over its new regulation, and a federal decide blocked police and prosecutors from imposing it whereas the case continues. However amid defiant directives from the Florida legal professional normal, some officers continued making immigration arrests for greater than a month. At the very least 27 individuals had been arrested after the decide’s order, a latest Marshall Challenge investigation discovered.
Amongst them was Juan Aguilar, who acquired right into a fender bender in late Might, was arrested by deputies, transferred to ICE custody and deported in somewhat over one week. By the point the court docket corrected its error, he was already in Mexico.
“Not everybody who’s there’s a felony; plenty of us are good individuals,” Aguilar instructed The Marshall Challenge in Spanish. “However they deal with us all the identical.”
States are additionally passing new legal guidelines that ramp up cooperation between police and federal immigration officers.
On Trump’s first day in workplace, he signed an government order increasing the 287(g) program, which permits police to accomplice with federal immigration authorities by becoming a member of process forces, administering warrants or transferring detainees from native jails to federal custody. Since then, eight states have enacted legal guidelines encouraging or requiring participation in this system, and greater than 600 regulation enforcement businesses throughout the U.S. have signed new partnership agreements, in keeping with a Marshall Challenge evaluation of knowledge from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In New Hampshire, Belknap County Sheriff William Wright was the primary sheriff within the state to enter into such a partnership, which started in February. Wright described it as “one other software within the toolbox” for deputies, who can now detain individuals who have federal immigration warrants towards them. Now, 12 regulation enforcement businesses in New Hampshire have entered into the federal agreements.
The Marshall Challenge discovered a minimum of eight states, together with New Hampshire, that banned sanctuary insurance policies this 12 months. In the meantime, 5 Democrat-led states handed legal guidelines limiting cooperation with immigration authorities or banning their entry into faculties and different places.
New Hampshire state Rep. Ross Berry, a Republican from Hillsborough who co-authored the state’s sanctuary ban, mentioned his constituents are blue-collar staff fighting inflation and competing towards undocumented immigrants for work. Berry mentioned his immigration insurance policies are in style amongst his voters.
“My voters loves it,” he mentioned. “I’ll positively be placing it on the market after I run for re-election.”
Not all regulation enforcement leaders agree that immigration enforcement aids their work. The police chief in Hollis, New Hampshire, spoke out towards the state’s anti-sanctuary regulation for opening up officers to legal responsibility and hurting police-community relations. He retired earlier than the invoice was enacted.
In La Vergne, Tennessee, police mentioned the aggressive immigration efforts are scaring individuals away from calling for assist throughout emergencies. In Might, a six-month-old died after the infant’s caregiver, an undocumented individual, was too afraid to contact emergency companies, in keeping with La Vergne Police Chief Christopher Moews.
“If I’ve people who find themselves afraid to return ahead and supply a witness assertion to a taking pictures or a theft, and even report a sexual abuse of a kid, or issues of that nature, due to their documentation standing, that’s not serving to out public security right here,” he mentioned.
Even if courts ultimately strike down the states’ newest anti-immigration legal guidelines, teams that advocate for immigrants’ rights mentioned the brand new measures ship a sign to undocumented individuals, their households and their communities. “It does not matter in the event you’ve constructed a life right here,” defined Stephanie M. Alvarez-Jones, an legal professional with the Nationwide Immigration Challenge. “It does not matter in the event you’ve contributed to your group, or native financial system, or the state financial system. You aren’t protected and you aren’t welcome.”
The legal guidelines additionally draw a hyperlink between immigrants and criminality, although analysis reveals that undocumented individuals commit crimes at decrease charges than most people, and knowledge doesn’t help narratives of migrant crime waves.
Immigration attorneys and activists throughout the U.S. instructed The Marshall Challenge that their shoppers more and more concern being profiled for his or her pores and skin coloration or accent, even when they’re lawful U.S. residents. Consequently, many immigrants are staying indoors, refusing to drive, skipping work or leaving Republican-majority states altogether.
“They’re imply and depressing statutes,” mentioned Carlos Torres, coverage director on the Hispanic and Immigrant Middle of Alabama, in reference to the brand new legal guidelines. “They don’t seem to be actually seeking to empower our group, however as a substitute, try to chop the wings of people that can really be very productive and who’re right here in group with us.”
