DeSantis's "Show Me Your Papers" Act Targets Families
New anti-immigrant proposals take xenophobia to a violent new extreme
Welcome to a new edition of the SWORD newsletter, a project devoted to exposing Ron DeSantis’s reign of terror in Florida and stopping him from taking that cruelty and corruption to the White House.
The Republican supermajority in Florida is on the glide path to once again making DeSantis’s sickest dreams come true. Tallahassee is now an extension of DeSantis’s presidential campaign, tasked with passing policies engineered to earn plaudits on Fox News no matter how much harm they cause Floridians.
Tonight, we highlight the almost unfathomably reactionary immigration laws that will soon become a centerpiece of DeSantis’s yappy closed-door speeches to police unions and far-right donors.
Florida Wants to Make Family a Felony
by Thomas Kennedy
Despite having the third-highest immigrant population in the country, Florida has long limited the rights of undocumented immigrants. For years, the state has diminished the existence of the people that power its economy and shape its unique culture, robbing them of the freedoms that everyone else takes for granted as part of day-to-day life.
In a state so dependent on cars, the refusal to issue driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants is one of Florida’s crueler prohibitions. I grew up in Miami without papers, which left me relegated to walking or riding my bike to work and school for most of my youth, even in the sweltering South Florida heat.
Fortunately, many of my friends with cars were generous enough to give me a ride from time to time. They all knew that I was undocumented; I wouldn’t have needed a ride otherwise, but it was otherwise irrelevant. I didn’t have a license to drive, but it wasn’t as if I was banned from cars altogether. It was a far better option than driving without a license, which could have gotten me deported given how frequently police officers target certain drivers here. When they drove, we were all safe.
That all might change soon.
In late February, Ron DeSantis unveiled a series of extreme anti-immigrant proposals for the upcoming state legislative session. The wretched list of proposals includes one that would make it a third-degree felony to even drive with an undocumented person in the passenger seat. The same penalty would be levied against anyone who “conceals, harbors or shields” an undocumented immigrant from state or federal authorities.
The proposal’s language seems to contain one minor concession to rationality, criminalizing the transportation or sheltering of an undocumented person only when someone “knows or should reasonably know” their legal status. The devil is in the lack of detail; as is the case in DeSantis’s other cultural war laws, the wording is vague enough to not really be an exemption at all. Just look at how schools are shedding books out of an abundance of caution.
Banning books is often an early step down the slippery slope that leads to fascism, and here we are, looking at the criminalization of people themselves. Immigration is a fact of life here in Florida, where 722,000 U.S. citizens live with an undocumented person. The proposed ban on “harboring” undocumented immigrants would serve to divide and devastate families: 343,000 U.S. citizen children live with undocumented family members, while 132,000 U.S. citizens have an undocumented spouse. Should the legislature pass this law, it would be a felony for people to live as a family.
Think of the implications: A daughter could face jail time for driving her undocumented mother to the doctor, a younger sibling could be arrested for driving a younger sibling, and should the police really get zealous, they could all face prosecution for living together. DeSantis’s obsession with “protecting children” has never seemed more hollow or cynical.
Beyond criminalizing how family members, friends, coworkers, and loved ones with different immigration statuses interact with each other, this bill also has far-reaching implications for workers. Are taxi and Uber drivers in Florida expected to check the immigration status of every single person who enters their vehicle? Are Airbnb hosts also expected to do the same? What does “reasonably know” really mean? Simply being arrested is enough to send the lives of immigrants into chaos.
Side note: Kidnapping migrants and flying them across the country goes unmentioned in the bill, but the legislature already made that retroactively legal for DeSantis after he screwed up.
House Bill 1617 and Senate Bill 1718 are comprehensive in their cruelty and serve as a declaration of a new era of political malice. Additional provisions would reverse existing state laws that offered legal rights and protections to undocumented people — laws that were in large part signed into law by Republicans — while others seek out new ways of punishing immigrants. The list of proposals includes:
Increasing fines and penalties on Florida businesses that hire undocumented people. Penalties for business owners include being stripped of their business license, which has become one of DeSantis’s favorite tools to punish bars and hotels that hosted drag performances.
Prohibiting undocumented people from using a driver's license issued to them in states such as California and New York, where they are permitted to drive.
Outlawing local governments from funding nonprofit groups that create community ID programs that allow undocumented people to do basic tasks such as picking up their kids from school or accessing municipal services during an emergency.
Repealing the 2014 legislation that allows undocumented lawyers to obtain a license to practice law in the state of Florida
Mandating that hospitals receiving Medicaid dollars start tracking money spent on caring for immigrants in Florida emergency rooms.
There are additional anti-immigrant bills floating around the legislature, including one that would reverse a law signed by Gov. Rick Scott that allowed undocumented immigrants who lived in Florida to pay in-state tuition at public colleges.
All told, DeSantis’s crackdown would constitute an unprecedented attack on undocumented immigrants and a violation of human rights that would make the infamous Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio blush. They are not simply messaging bills, either, as the GOP legislature now largely consists of cowards and sycophants who serve as a rubber stamp for extremist right-wing proposals. On Wednesday, the Senate Rules committee passed SB 1718, sending it one step closer to DeSantis’s desk.
It’s been said that the cruelty is the point, but that only partially applies here; these bills are also designed to allow DeSantis to stand on a GOP presidential primary debate stage against Donald Trump and proclaim himself the biggest, nastiest xenophobe in the room.
These bills rarely get national media attention, because everything DeSantis does is now portrayed as an act of political gamesmanship. Little attention is paid to the people who have the most to lose, casting aside the families and communities that will be torn apart for merely supporting one another. Let Florida be a warning to the rest of the country: This is your future if you don’t stop an authoritarian like DeSantis and his acolytes on their tracks.
Thomas Kennedy is an elected Democratic National Committee member from Florida. You can find him on Twitter and Instagram at @tomaskenn
HE Has Turned Florida Into A Fascist State