“Y’all don’t live in our f— skin.”
That’s what Texas state Rep. Armando Walle (D-Houston) told his friend and fellow representative Cody Harris, a Republican, who made a motion to cut off debate on HB 4, a bill that would empower law enforcement officers in Texas to deport people who they suspect are in the U.S. without legal documentation.
In Jessie Fuentes’ hometown of Eagle Pass, he sees concertina wire and a floating barrier outfitted with serrated blades on the river where he grew up.
House Bill 4, Walle said, “gives all the power discretion to that police officer to then determine if somebody is here undocumented.”
The bill’s passage came early Thursday morning after Republicans on the House floor moved to block additional amendments, a rare approach to cut debate short.
That spurred Walle to go on an impassioned and profanity-laced outburst that Rep. Ana-Maria Ramos captured on video, which she posted and has since been shared widely across social media.
“You’re my friend, man, I love you, but this f— hurts. The s— that happens on this godd—ed floor hurts. I can’t go hang out with my,” Walle was captured saying, pausing as he became emotional.
“I can’t drive my brother, my cousin, OK. I can’t take them anywhere, bro? I can’t go to a boda [wedding], I can’t go to a baptism, because my community is being attacked? Y’all don’t understand the s— that you do hurts our community.”
Reached early Friday afternoon, Walle said he had “no regrets” about speaking up the way he did, especially “if it calls attention to the issue.” Walle said he was unaware he was being filmed. He doesn’t do this work “for the clicks,” he said, adding that “the response has been overwhelming.”
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Walle, a practicing attorney, said he was recognized while eating lunch at Doña Maria in Houston after court on Friday. A waitress came up to him, and said: “Mijo, te mereces una corona.” (Son, you deserve a crown.)
He said the owner of the restaurant walked up to him with a styrofoam cup and joked that he needed to “wash out your mouth” after the slew of profanities he used. But in seriousness, she told him, “You keep fighting. We appreciate what you’re doing and keep standing up for us.”
She gave him the bendición (blessing).
“I got emotional again, but in a different way,” Walle said.
Walle said it was unlike him to publicly use profanity and go off that way. “I usually use that in the back halls,” he said, but he added, “the Holy Ghost came over me.”
A total of three border bills passed early Thursday: House Bill 4, which would make it a state crime to enter Texas illegally from Mexico; House Bill 6, which would appropriate $1.5 billion to build more border barriers; and Senate Bill 4, which would impose a minimum 10-year jail sentence for smuggling immigrants. SB 4 already was passed by the Texas Senate and just needs Gov. Greg Abbott to sign it to become state law.
State Rep. David Spiller, a Republican from Jacksboro who sponsored House Bill 4, said, “There is nothing unfair about ordering someone back from where they came if they arrived here illegally.”
Meanwhile, Abbott expressed enthusiasm for the passage of these bills on X, formerly Twitter, saying that he was ready to sign Senate Bill 4 into law.
“This has been a key priority since Day 1,” he said.
Walle sees House Bill 4 and Senate Bill 4 as working in tandem.
“I’m not for human smuggling, but the way in which these folks in power are utilizing state law, which mostly is a federal issue, is problematic,” Walle said.
Under Senate Bill 4, Walle imagined a scenario in which someone could be considered a human smuggler and could risk a 10-year jail sentence simply for driving a group of relatives, some of whom could be undocumented, to a family gathering such as a quinceañera.
“That is god-awful. Many of us come from mixed-status family. I’m one of those. I’m not the only one,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Texas also criticized these bills, saying in a statement that although these “new laws are unprecedented,” the “anti-immigrant script is far too familiar.”
“Instead of spending billions on failed and unlawful border policies, state politicians should address the real issues Texans face,” the statement read.
Walle said that in his 16 years as a legislator, “we’ve had just a proliferation of anti-immigrant bills, and each session, they’ve gotten successively worse.”
He thought back to 2017 when Republicans allowed hours of debate before passing a controversial immigration bill.
To Walle, process matters, and he said it was incredibly problematic to “limit the ability of people like me, with issues with the bill, to file amendments.” He called it “undemocratic.”
“A vast majority of the people that I spoke to, both Democrat and Republican, felt that on principle, I was in the correct, that I was right to be upset,” he said.
Walle said he and Harris have exchanged texts since the outburst.
Harris, he said, “is a friend of mine. We go hunting together. As a matter of fact, we would have been probably hunting this week.”
“My goal is to sit down with him and have a heart-to-heart ... because the worst thing you can do is not find a path forward.”
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