Horowitz: State legislatures should convene special sessions to repel border invasion, bar education for illegal aliens

House Republicans might not have the votes to get their immigration enforcement bill (HR 2) signed into law, but the red states absolutely have the votes to choke off illegal immigration. Although much of the focus is on the border itself, these illegal aliens don’t remain at the border. The problem is most acute in individual communities within the states, particularly in the education system. Therefore, the solution to deterring it at this point in history lies primarily with the states.

Yesterday, I called on all GOP governors to gather in Texas and contribute resources to help repel the invasion. But perhaps an even less costly and more effective solution is for state governments to simply suggest that those rushing over the border this week cannot resettle in their states. No jobs, no identity, no benefits, no health care, and no schooling. Our doors are completely closed.

Most state legislatures are either out of session or are past the time for introducing new legislation and are about to adjourn. They should immediately convene special sessions to warn the world that their respective states are closed for business. If Republicans are really committed to ending this problem rather than just using it as a talking point against Biden as our communities burn, they would implement the following:

• Absolutely no jobs for illegal aliens.
• Strict penalties for anyone caught stealing identities or being an accomplice to identity theft.
• Severe penalties on fentanyl traffickers.
• Long prison sentences for those caught knowingly transporting illegal aliens into the state.
• Fund removal operations to make DeSantis’ Martha’s Vineyard flight the standard for red-state removals.
• Ban all sanctuary cities within the states.
• Create trespassing laws targeting illegal aliens as felons.

Finally, the time has come for states to directly challenge the ridiculous Plyler v. Doe (1982) decision that requires states to educate illegal aliens. The cost of education is, by far, the steepest price for state governments. The Federation for Immigration Reform estimates that it costs states $73 billion a year to educate other countries’ citizens who are here illegally. States must declare that anyone found to have come to this country in this wave of the invasion is completely ineligible for schooling within the state. There’s got to be a limit, and now is the time to draw that line.

Education is the biggest budget item in every state. As such, states have the right to say “no mas” to the blank check funding the invasion of our schools with children smuggled by the cartels and used as passports for admission into this country. We must make it clear that a half-century of this invasion is enough and that any child henceforth brought into this country will have no future here.

With a better makeup of the Supreme Court, Texas and other states need to do what they did with Roe v. Wade and set up a direct challenge to the absurd Plyler opinion, written by radical leftist William Brennan. In 1975, the state of Texas passed a law prohibiting local school districts from using state education funds to subsidize illegal aliens in public schools. Writing for the majority in striking down the state law, Brennan created a Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection right to education — even for illegal aliens — forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for those who had no right to be in the state.

“Aliens, even aliens whose presence in this country is unlawful, have long been recognized as ‘persons’ guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments,” declared a sanctimonious Brennan.

Now is the perfect time to set up that challenge, because if such a “right” holds true today, it would mean every state is on the hook to educate half the world. We’re no longer talking about one or two people per school district, but a torrent of children from all over the world that will transform the school districts with more languages than are spoken in any other country on the planet. The notion that anyone’s decision in Venezuela, China, or Kyrgyzstan to make the trek to our border triggers a requirement for the people in suburban Houston to fund their education is preposterous.

This term, Texas state Senator Drew Springer introduced SB 923, which would bar illegal aliens from public schools unless the federal government agrees to pay for it. Unfortunately, it has gone nowhere. While it is shocking that 10% of all schoolchildren in this country have been designated as “Limited English Proficiency,” that number is closer to one in five in Texas. There are more than 1 million LEPs in the Lone Star State, according to FAIR, at a cost of over $11 billion to Texas taxpayers. And those numbers do not include the recent surge. Not all LEPs are illegal aliens or children of illegal aliens, but the overwhelming majority of them are.

But it’s not just a problem in the border states. Take Indiana, for example, where Indianapolis police have just declared the capital city a sanctuary for the invasion. WISH reported last year: “Across Indiana, there are nearly 78,000 students called ‘English Learners’ who receive lessons in both English and Spanish. The number of English learners in Indiana schools has increased by almost 27,000 from six years ago.” FAIR estimates that 22% of Indianapolis students are LEPs!

When the framers indicted King George in the Declaration of Independence for ignoring the security of the states, they could not possibly have imagined that the federal government they established — the unelected executive agencies and the courts — would collectively disenfranchise a sovereign state from following the laws passed by Congress to protect itself from a mass illegal invasion. They could not have envisioned our own government tipping off the invaders this week about the exact locations of the “enforcement operation” they planned in El Paso as stagecraft by the Biden administration.