UPDATE: Senators voted to kill Senate File 166.
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Senate File 166 would send more than $5 million out of state to support harmful and unnecessary immigration policies.
The ACLU of Wyoming opposes Senate File 166. Construction of a permanent border between the United States and Mexico and transporting asylum seekers will do nothing to benefit the people of Wyoming.
Immigrants in Wyoming have always been an important part of our state’s history, culture and economy — but immigrant communities continue to be profiled, harassed, detained and demonized. Bills like Senate File 166 only exacerbate this rhetoric.
Without thinking through crucial facts of border security — like the fact that many of the people currently arriving at U.S. borders are asylum seekers who turn themselves in and that drugs enter through ports of entry or in the mail, rather than being smuggled through at other locations — the effort by some of our legislators to fund a border wall is doomed to repeat past border security failures.
Additionally, immigrants and asylum-seekers are people. We should not be treating human beings like cargo, involuntarily flying or busing people and families, based on their perceived immigration status, hundreds or thousands of miles away without telling them their destination.
