Alabama Tried a Trump-Like ‘Frankenstein’ Immigration Overhaul. It Ended Badly.

DONALD TRUMP WANTS YOU TO ENVISION a world where providing running water or renting an apartment to illegal immigrants is a crime. Where law enforcement acting upon “reasonable suspicion” can detain people to determine their immigration status. Where anyone who gives a person in the country illegally a ride—even giving a colleague a ride to work or a neighbor a ride home—can be penalized. Where undocumented people can neither seek work nor enroll in public college. Where schools must collecting immigration status information from children—including about their parents.

But as the president sets about putting together this tapestry of harsh new immigration laws, not everyone needs to imagine the consequences. Some Americans have actually lived through them.

In 2011, Alabama passed HB 56, which contained some of these very same provisions. It was widely considered the harshest in the nation at the time. And it was chaos.

Undocumented immigrants fled the state, school attendance plummeted, fruits and vegetables rotted on the vine after farmworkers disappeared and Americans given the chance to replace them couldn’t make it through one day of work.

The National Immigration Law Center found at the time that the costs of HB 56 went far beyond economic dislocation. It created an environment of racial profiling by law enforcement officials and sanctioned discrimination by private citizens against anyone suspected of being “foreign.”

Legal challenges largely succeeded in defanging the law, but the political life and death of HB 56 still provides lessons for the Trump administration and Republicans as they try to make the lives of undocumented immigrants impossible.

Not long after the HB 56 passed, Mother Jones reported that illegal immigrants accounted “for just 2.5 percent of Alabama’s population” and that, “according to the Pew Hispanic Center, only a third of the state’s 34,000 Latino children are undocumented—less than one-half of 1 percent of all of Alabama’s students, according to the Census Bureau.”

But, the report noted, that the number of undocumented people in the state had roughly doubled between 2005 and 2011, “prompting the law’s proponents to use language that suggests an infestation.” Sponsors of the law claimed illegal immigrants were costing Alabama between $600 and $800 million annually in, what was unscientifically described as, “a lot of things.” When a local paper attempted to fact check these figures, they were found to come from a flawed study by the far-right Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which itself put the number at $298 million. Sponsors cast the law as “putting Alabamians back to work,” promising it would be “the biggest jobs program for Alabamians that has ever been passed.”

This sound familiar?

State Rep. Mickey Hammon, a co-sponsor who would later go to prison for mail fraud, said at the time that the law was modeled after Arizona’s hardline SB1070, which itself was watered down by the U.S. Supreme Court. The difference, Hammon added, was that HB 56 had an “Alabama flavor” that “attacks every aspect of an illegal immigrant’s life.”

“You Have Good Folks Who May or May Not be Legal”

Local Republicans, elected officials, and law enforcement who had to deal with the realities of HB 56 turned against it long ago—a change of heart that could serve as a warning to MAGA acolytes following Trump and Stephen Miller into enforcement oblivion.

Albertville Mayor Tracy Honea was swept into office in 2012 amid a backlash against HB 56, a cycle in which every incumbent in the city lost.In an interview with The Bulwark, he danced around how he approached the law at the time. While he said that he does support part of Trump’s immigration policy, he acknowledged he has problems with the administration punishing law-abiding immigrants, even if they’re in the country illegally. His perspective is informed as someone who bears the scars of HB 56.

“I thought they were going after criminals and felons, [and] that’s great,” he said. “But we need to make it easier, if we have folks who have been here for 15 to 20 years and maintain good citizenship, who may or may not be legal, what are we doing to make it simpler for those folks to become legal?”

Honea made it clear that his town has not suffered due to immigration. “I don’t go around asking folks if they are legal or not,” he said. “I think it’s much better than it used to be, but that process needs to become simplified in a sense, so if you have good, productive residents who want to create a better life for themselves and their families, that’s what America is built on.”

Former Albertville Police Chief Doug Pollard did support parts of the law at the time of its passage. He has since retired and took a new job as police chief at Snead State Community College. He told The Bulwark that he did not remember the particulars of HB 56 and would have to research them again before commenting. “I’m not trying to be difficult,” he said. “I don’t really remember the law, so I don’t want to make statements about it.”

But his past public utterances indicated that he came to see the law as mean spirited and flawed. Back in 2013, in an interview with NBC News, Pollard said the town’s Hispanic community stopped speaking to police about anything. “If they had a crime committed against them, they used to come to us,” he said at the time. “Then this new law came out and they got scared.”

It wasn’t just Hispanic Alabamans who got caught up in the law’s zealous enforcement. In November 2011, a German Mercedes-Benz executive who left his passport and ID in his hotel room was detained after a routine traffic stop. Two weeks later, a Japanese Honda employee was charged with violating HB 56 despite showing a Japanese driver’s license, a passport, and a work permit.

“I’ve learned in life that if you make a mistake, you should be man enough to admit it,” Republican state Sen. Gerald Dial, who voted for the law, told NBC News shortly after the Mercedes arrest.

Dial did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

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“THE ALABAMA LAW CRASHED AND BURNED because it was a Frankenstein monster, it was unlawful from start to finish,” said Karen Tumlin, the managing attorney who authored the NILC report on the law. She said to this day she still remembers the traumatic hotline phone calls that went directly to her personal cell phone.

Complaints commonly involved bullying of Latino children at school. At the elementary school in Crossville, one teacher asked students whose parents were born outside the United States to raise their hands. Some children threatened to report Latino classmates and their families to immigration authorities and asked why they hadn’t gone back to Mexico, the report said. A caller to the hotline said that she’d withdrawn her son from school after a classmate called him “frijolito” (“little beaner”) a few days after HB 56 took effect. Another reported that fellow students began harassing her 14-year-old cousin. They would point at him and other Latino students and say, “You’re Mexican. You can’t be here.”

Tumlin was also shocked when a law student intern saw a sign outside a public utility which said “Citizens Only” for water, sewage, and electricity, recalling Jim Crow.

“The law was someone’s xenophobic dream, but they went so far in their illegality that they said you can’t have water, sewage, or electrical services unless you prove your citizenship,” Tumlin told The Bulwark.

The legacy of Alabama has reemerged for immigrant supporters now amid stories that contain painful echoes of that era, such as that of an 11-year-old girl named Jocelynn Rojo Carranza. Carranza’s mother said her daughter committed suicide this month after being bullied and threatened over her family’s immigration status.

Tumlin sees other parallels. She noted that the injunction against Trump’s birthright citizenship directive shows, once more, that there are boundaries to how far politicians can push. But some states are itching for a Supreme Court fight, hoping to create even more latitude by attacking precedents.

“Those precedents, especially Plyler, have long been seen as being potentially vulnerable,” Shalini Ray, an associate professor of law and the director of faculty research at the University of Alabama, told The Bulwark, referring to a 1982 ruling that states cannot deny students a free public education due to their immigration status. “Even Arizona vs. United States,” the 2012 case that stuck down three of the four pillars of SB1070, “people think there is some vulnerability there, so you could have less of a check by the federal courts.”

Beyond the testing of the strictures of the law, Tumlin said she fears another echo of Alabama: The bubbling up of private hate that can only be counteracted by Americans of good conscience.

“What keeps me up at night is that when the state or federal government goes so far