Latest news with #SB15
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
In final days of session, legislature advances Landry immigration agenda
Officers with Louisiana State Police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement escort a man arrested March 13, 2025, at the Port of Lake Charles. ICE reported 11 arrests of people working at the port who did not have legal status to be in the United States (Photo courtesy of ICE). Two controversial state bills in the Louisiana Legislature — both designed to aid federal and state crackdowns on immigration — are in the final stages of becoming law after passing overwhelmingly in the state House of Representatives Monday. With days to go in the spring legislative session, Louisiana's House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly in favor of Senate Bill 100, which requires agencies to track undocumented immigrants who receive state services, and Senate Bill 15, which makes it a crime for law enforcement agents, and others, to refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement agencies. The session is set to adjourn on Thursday. The bills both advance the priorities of Gov. Jeff Landry, a conservative immigration hardliner and ally of President Donald Trump. Senate Bill 100, sponsored by Sen. Blake Miguez, R-New Iberia, which requires service providing public agencies – including the state Department of Education, Department of Corrections and the Department of Children & Family Services – to collect data and report to the State on the immigration status of people who receive those services. It passed 74-27 Monday afternoon. Senate Bill 15, sponsored by Sen. Jay Morris, R-West Monroe, criminalizes the failure of local officials – including sheriffs and other law enforcement officers – to cooperate with federal immigration agencies, with penalties of up to 10 years in prison. It also criminalizes acts by everyday Louisiana residents deemed to obstruct or 'thwart' federal immigration enforcement efforts. It passed 71-30. If Senate Bill 15 becomes law, it would directly conflict with immigration policies adopted by the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office and, potentially, the New Orleans Police Department, both of which are under federal orders to limit their cooperation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal immigration agencies. Both have already passed the Senate. SB100 will now head back to the Senate for Senate President Cameron Henry's signature and then to Landry's desk for his signature. Senate Bill 15, however, was amended in the House before final passage. The Senate will have to vote to approve the amended version before it can move on to become law. Advocates against the pieces of legislation say the bills, once effected, will push Louisiana's immigrant community into the shadows. 'With the passage of SB 100 and SB 15, our state has sent a chilling message: that Immigrant families and anyone seeking safety or services are seen as expendable.' said Tia Fields, who manages policy for advocacy group Louisianan Organization for Refugees and Immigrants in Baton Rouge. 'Let's be clear: these bills aren't about public safety. They're about punishment.' If enacted, Senate Bill 15 will be the first state law in the U.S. that criminalizes interference with immigration enforcement efforts, considered to be civil matters, or refusals to cooperate with federal immigration agencies. During debate on the House Floor on Monday Rep. Candace Newell, D-New Orleans, repeatedly asked how the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office would follow the law, which directly contradicts an agency policy that was created under federal court order. The bill requires jailers, including sheriffs, to honor administrative requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to hold an immigrant beyond their release date from jail so that they can be brought into ICE custody. But a Sheriff's Office policy prohibits the agency from honoring hold requests except in cases where a jail detainee is accused of a particularly serious crime. The policy exists as the result of a 2013 federal court settlement stemming from a 2011 civil rights case in which two men said they were illegally held in the city's jail for months at the request of ICE. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, another immigration hardliner, is challenging that settlement agreement. Louisiana already has a law, Act 314 of 2024 – enacted through Senate Bill 208, sponsored by Miguez and passed last year – that blocks local law enforcement agencies from adopting so-called 'sanctuary' like the one at the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office. But unlike Senate Bill 15 — which calls for prison sentences of up to 10 years — that is a civil law, carrying no jail time for failure to comply. 'The Orleans Parish Sheriff, who should be trying to get out from under the handcuffs of the consent decree, [is] using that as a shield to avoid the possible implications of refusing to cooperate with ICE,' Morris told committee members. Will Harrell, senior program monitor for the Sheriff's Office said while he's disappointed that the bill passed, he is 'not surprised with the outcome, given the anti-immigrant climate.' He said he's concerned about how Orleans Parish Sheriff, Susan Hutson, will follow both the state law and the federal court order 'The sheriff does not intend to be a breaker of laws,' Harrell said. 'It's just a question of which law we need to follow.' Senate Bill 100 mirrors a 2024 executive order from Landry, signed in the early days of his governorship, that requires state departments and their sub-agencies to calculate and report on the amount of money that undocumented immigrants are costing the state. According to Rep. Michael Johnson, R-Pineville — who brought the bill to the House floor — Landry and Murrill requested SB15 be crafted to codify the language in that executive order. Undocumented immigrants are already shut out of some state-administered services. They are ineligible for food stamp benefits or Medicaid, for example, and they can't get drivers' licenses. But they attend schools, get medical treatment at public hospitals and use emergency shelters, among other things. Advocates against the bill said recording identifying information like citizenship or immigration status, will not only affect undocumented immigrants, but also people who may not trust their government for other reasons, making it less likely that they seek out essential services like medical care. 'Not all of these services require any kind of identification right now, [like] the low barrier homeless shelters or food banks or things like that, and there are people who are going to be unwilling to get benefits if it requires of citizenship verification,' Sissy Phleger, a safety net analyst for state think tank Invest in Louisiana, said in a phone interview last week. 'It is going to burden people in Louisiana who don't have enough to eat. I don't have a place to live and that seems cruel and unnecessary.' During discussions over the bill on the House floor, Democratic Caucus chairperson Rep. Matthew Willard, D-New Orleans, expressed concern over the proposed penalties in the bill: the withholding of funding to agencies that do not comply. 'For me it seems kind of like a threat,' Willard said. Johnson called the penalty an 'incentive' to follow the law. 'This is just transparency,' Johnson said. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE This article first appeared on Verite News New Orleans and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Texas House revives zoning reform bill to lower minimum lot sizes
AUSTIN (Nexstar) — Senate Bill 15 — which prevents larger cities from imposing minimum residential lot sizes of 3,000 square feet or larger — appeared to be dead on Sunday. State Rep. Ramon Romero Jr., D-Fort Worth, had called a point of order on the bill, claiming a population bracket improperly restricted a political subdivision. He was correct. 'The bill as reported from committee exempted from its application a location that is, among other things, within 'one mile of a campus of the perimeter of a law enforcement training center in a county that has a population of 2,600,000 or more but less than 2,700,000,' the House journal from Sunday reads. 'The chair notes that the rule permits the use of minimum or maximum population in a bill to limit its application, but not both. Here, the bracket includes only Dallas County. The chair would be required to find a reasonable relationship between the location of a law enforcement training center in Dallas County and the bill's purpose of increasing the housing supply…The chair can find no such relationship.' When a point of order is sustained, the bill must go back to committee to fix the error before going back through the process to reach the House floor. That presented a problem for SB 15, as the bill had to be voted on by Tuesday at midnight, and the bills to be brought up on deadline day had to be cemented on Sunday night. Quickly, legislators got to work to fix the bill in time. At 2:50 p.m., SB 15 was sent back to committee, and by 6:52 p.m. it was in the hands of the calendars committee, who controls the docket of bills for each day. The calendars committee earmarked SB 15 for Tuesday's major state calendar that night, pushing it to the top of docket. Another lawmaker tried to get the bill killed again, saying it was expedited improperly. 'I respectfully raise a point-of-order against further consideration of Senate Bill 15 on the grounds the bill was improperly placed on the major state calendar,' State Rep. Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, D-San Antonio, said. Items placed on the major state calendar must be of importance to the entire state. Gervin-Hawkins argued this bill shouldn't qualify, because it's application is limited to municipalities with over 150,000 people. After a lengthy delay, her point of order was overruled. 'The bill is a major reform of state land use law and will have major implications for housing and economic activity throughout the state,' State Rep. Brooks Landgraf, R-Odessa, said as he presided over the Speaker's desk. 'Additionally, rule 6, section 25, gives the committee on calendars wide discretion over which calendar it will place a bill on. The point of order is respectfully overruled.' After a pair of amendments, the bill passed a third reading with a 87-48 vote. SB 15 aims to reduce housing prices by improving housing availability. Austin recently changed their minimum lot size for single-family homes from 5,750 square feet to 1,800 square feet. Houston changed their to 1,400 square feet for certain residences within the city center in 1998, expanding it to the whole city in 2013. A Pew study claims this allowed single-family homes to be replaced with townhouses, opening up more affordable housing options. 'We're looking down a very bleak future [if we don't take action],' Nicole Nosek, founder of Texans for Reasonable Solutions, said. 'We're looking at a situation where not only are we not going to be able to have our kids and our grandkids live in the same city that they grew up in, but on top of that — all this flourishing economic activity that we're seeing move to Texas, we jeopardize that by not allowing the middle class to own a piece of the American dream of home ownership.' SB 15 aims to mandate the changes Austin and Houston voluntarily went through. The bill prevents a municipality with over 150,000 people from imposing a minimum lot size less than 3,000 square feet (changed from 1,500 square feet with a floor amendment). While the idea sailed through both the Senate and House committees unanimously, and passed the Senate floor 29-2, there was pushback in the House, particularly from those representing the Dallas-Fort-Worth area. 'I don't want to take away the ability for my city and the people of my city to be able to control the size of the lots and the homes that are put there,' State Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, said. 'I own a security company, and I'll tell you that these high-density locations cost hundred of thousands and sometimes a couple million of dollars a year to secure after they've been there 10-20 years because they become crime-ridden.' The opposition was bipartisan. 'Do you believe that residents should be silenced when it comes to your law that is affecting someone's neighborhood? When they bought their home, they moved into a single-family residential area,' Romero said. 'You don't believe that people should have their voice heard?' SB 15 will be heard for a third reading on Wednesday. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Texas House OKs bill to allow smaller homes on smaller lots amid housing affordability crunch
The Texas House gave a thumbs-up Tuesday to a bill allowing smaller homes on smaller lots in Texas' biggest cities, part of a broad push by state lawmakers to put a dent in the state's high home prices. But the House made significant tweaks that would limit how many new homes could be built under the bill, setting up a potential showdown with the Texas Senate over one of Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's biggest priorities. Senate Bill 15 would reduce how much land cities say single-family homes in new subdivisions must sit on. The idea is to let homebuilders construct homes on smaller amounts of land, thus reducing the overall price of the home. 'This bill allows the option of building homes at different types and price points to meet the demand and needs of buyers,' said state Rep. Gary Gates, a Richmond Republican who carried the bill in the House. 'Lowering the size and type of residential housing will increase the amount of housing that can be built and lowers housing costs.' Initially, SB 15 would forbid major cities from requiring homes in new subdivisions to sit on more than 1,400 square feet as first proposed in the bill. Gates amended that provision Tuesday to 3,000 square feet. The state's biggest cities tend to require single-family homes to sit on around 5,000 to 7,500 square feet of land, a Texas Tribune analysis found. The provision would only apply in new subdivisions with at least five acres of land, and wouldn't touch existing neighborhoods. The bill would only apply to cities with at least 150,000 residents in counties with a population of 300,000 or more — 19 of the state's largest cities, per a Tribune analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. It also wouldn't apply in cases in which homeowners association and restrictive covenants prevent smaller lot sizes. Tuesday's 87-48 vote came after a dramatic turn of events at the tail end of the legislation in which a Democrat tried to kill the bill on a technicality, but supporters managed to revive it in time to reach the full House before a key deadline. Some Democrats weren't convinced the bill would tame housing costs — though evidence broadly suggests that homes on smaller lots have lower values than those on bigger lots. Some of them expressed uneasiness about the state weighing in on what kinds of homes can be built and where, a power the state grants to cities. 'They (residents) didn't elect their state representatives to decide how their city would develop, not on that level, not with this kind of density,' said state Rep. Ramon Romero, D-Fort Worth, who previously moved to kill the bill on procedural grounds. Romero successfully tacked on an amendment that will require cities to adopt a separate zoning category to comply with the bill, essentially meaning the bill wouldn't automatically apply to existing single-family zoning categories. A majority of the chamber's Republicans and Democrats voted in favor of the bill Tuesday. It has to clear a second, final vote Wednesday in order to advance. From there, the Senate would have to sign off on changes the House made to the bill — or appoint a conference committee to hash out the differences between the two chambers. SB15 is part of a constellation of proposals in the Texas Legislature aimed at curbing the state's high housing costs, chiefly by clearing red tape and cutting local regulations in order to allow more homes to be built. Texas needs about 320,000 more homes than it has, according to an estimate by the housing group Up For Growth. That shortage, housing experts and advocates argue, played a key role in driving up home prices and rents as the state boomed. Lawmakers on Monday sent a bill to Gov. Greg Abbott's desk that would allow apartments and mixed-use developments along retail and commercial corridors. Both chambers have approved bills to make it harder for property owners to stop new homes from being built near them and encourage cities to allow the construction of smaller apartments. They've also initially approved a bill to relax local rules in college towns that say how many unrelated adults can live in a home. House lawmakers also gave preliminary approval to a bill intended to reduce hurdles to convert vacant office buildings into residences. Whether a separate bill to allow additional dwelling units in the backyards of single-family homes, which died in the House two years ago, will make it over the finish line before a key deadline in the House on Tuesday night remains to be seen. First round of TribFest speakers announced! Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd; U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, R-San Antonio; Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker; U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff, D-California; and U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas are taking the stage Nov. 13–15 in Austin. Get your tickets today!
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
This Week in Louisiana Politics: Insurance reform, immigration bills, SNAP benefits
BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — On This Week in Louisiana Politics, lawmakers focus on lowering insurance costs, debating proposed immigration legislation and discussing changes to SNAP benefits. Here's a recap of the latest in Louisiana political news. HB 330, authored by Rep. Edmond Jordan, would establish an income tax credit for annual homeowners' insurance premiums. Homeowners who pay over $3,000 a year in insurance premiums would qualify for the tax break. Sen. John 'Jay' Morris III wrote SB 15, which would make it a crime to interfere with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) efforts. The bill would also modify the obstruction of justice offense, which, according to present law, targets acts such as tampering with evidence or interfering with criminal proceedings. SB15 would add an act stating that any action done with the intent to hinder immigration enforcement qualifies as obstruction of justice. Another bill related to immigration would require the state to communicate with ICE when someone is reaching out for public services, including food stamps and housing assistance. If the applicant is not a citizen, it would be a requirement that they be reported to ICE. Sen. Patrick McMath wants the Department of Children and Family Services to remove junk food from the SNAP eligibility list. Gov. Landry also filed an executive order to expedite the passing of McMath's proposed bill. Kyle Larson subs for Connor Zilisch, takes Xfinity victory at Texas Motor Speedway Top tips for investing in a mutual fund This Week in Louisiana Politics: Insurance reform, immigration bills, SNAP benefits 2 people, a dog dead after small plane crashes in Los Angeles-area neighborhood 'A miracle': Cat survives fall in Utah national park that killed two hikers Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Louisiana bill aims to criminalize blocking immigration enforcement efforts
BATON ROUGE, La. (Louisiana First) — A new bill was introduced in the Louisiana Legislature. It aims to make any interference with federal immigration activities a crime. SB 15, written by Sen. John 'Jay' Morris III (R-35), would change current law. It would also add clauses that make it a crime to delay immigration enforcement efforts. Malfeasance in office is a crime defined by current law. It occurs when a public official either fails to do a required task, acts unlawfully, or violates constitutional rights. This can lead to serious injury or even death. SB15 states that if public officials act, don't act, or refuse lawful requests from ICE, CBP, or USCIS, they would face consequences. The bill would also modify the obstruction of justice offense, which, according to present law, targets acts such as tampering with evidence or interfering with criminal proceedings. SB15 would add an act stating that any action done with the intent to hinder immigration enforcement qualifies as obstruction of justice. If the bill is passed, it would take effect on Aug. 1, 2025. Bill would penalize Louisiana gun owners if minors access unsecured firearms; most states already have storage laws Bloody fingers just part of the game in one traditional German sport Louisiana bill aims to criminalize blocking immigration enforcement efforts EPA allows high-ethanol gasoline to be used all year EBRSO identifies man hit and killed while sitting near bike on Jones Creek Road Autopsy shows Gene Hackman died of heart disease; toxicology report indicates prolonged fasting Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
