This is an opinion column.

“Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” — excerpt from Deuteronomy 4:6

Rep. Ernie Yarbrough touts that scripture on his website. In context, it’s not a decree of what is but what would be if the nation — Israel, in this case — observes God’s laws.

This precedes the excerpt: “Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, Surely …”

.. see above.

During the current legislative session, Yarbrough, R-Trinity, is pushing a bill that would allow state and local police to proffer partnerships with federal law enforcement officers who have more authority to arrest and detain people who may be undocumented immigrants (Put a pin in the latter).

All under the guise of protecting you and me.

The bill, Yarbrough told the House Judiciary Committee last week, “simply allows that partnership to take place just to address safety in our communities.”

Surely, Yarbrough knows safety’s got nothing to do with what he and other Alabama Republicans are trying to do — that there’s not a smidgen of correlation between undocumented immigrants and threats to public safety.

The American Immigration Council writes: “A robust body of research shows that welcoming immigrants into American communities not only does not increase crime but can actually strengthen public safety. In fact, immigrants — including undocumented immigrants — are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born.”

Studying the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. between 1980 and 2022 (the most recent year available), it notes: While the immigrant population share grew from 6.2% to 13.9%, the crime rate fell from 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people to 2,335 crimes per 100,000 people. The violent crime rate fell by 34.5 percent; the property crime rate fell by 63.3 percent.

The data — the truth — doesn’t change with studies focused on the undocumented. According to the National Library of Medicine at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative.”

On Feb. 24, 2024, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student at the University of Georgia, was accosted while jogging near campus and tragically murdered by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old undocumented Venezuelan citizen who entered the United States in 2022.

Ibarra was convicted of a plethora of crimes, including felony murder. He is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Since the heinous crime was committed, Republicans have exploited it — and Riley’s memory — to embolden Donald Trump’s ungodly deportation edict. To justify yanking brown and foreign people from our streets, from their jobs, from their homes, from near their college campus, and — soon, you’ll see — from their secondary schools, detaining them and shipping them to another state or nation without a whiff of due process.

With a blatant, arrogant and haughty disregard for that fundamental, once-sacred tenet of our democracy.

You have the right to…

All under the guise of safety in our communities. Of protecting you and me.

It’s a lie. Surely Yarbrough knows.

His bill would also allow local officers to inquire about a person’s immigration status even if they’ve not been charged with a crime, something they cannot currently do because all immigration enforcement lies with the folks at ICE. The federal agency now-weaponized as Trump’s henchmen.

Hoss Mack, executive director of the Alabama Sheriffs Association, seems almost giddy at the new flexibility: “If you had a reasonable suspicion or probable cause that the person was illegal, then you can travel down the immigration issue without an adjacent criminal charge,” he said last week.

A reasonable suspicion. Think about that. Hey, you look undocumented…

Now think about it as if you’re a brown person or foreign student in Alabama.

Surely, Yarbrough knows of detener y revisar.

Okay, maybe he hasn’t. Translation: Stop and frisk.

Most innocently, stop and frisk is a “non-intrusive” police tactic that allows an officer to pat down someone if they reasonably believe the person is armed.

Yet the tactic was far from innocently deployed. In New York more than a decade ago, it was utilized to unreasonably target men of color. In 2010, it was reported that more than 80 percent of the city’s 601,055 police stops involved mostly young Black and Latino men. The vast majority of those stopped were never charged with a crime.

Under public pressure, stops tumbled precipitously (93 percent) between 2011 and 2014. Guess what? So did serious crimes, including murders and shootings.

Surely, Yarbrough knows this.

Surely, too, the 43-year-old Yarbrough is familiar with HB 56. He was 29 when the horrific anti-brown-immigrant legislation was signed into law in June of 2011. The law essentially gave police officers carte blanche to reasonably assess someone’s citizenship status if there was a “reasonable suspicion” they were undocumented.

It also allowed for a whole lot of other unreasonable harassment of brown people, such as demanding that secondary public school officials determine the citizenship status of a student they are required to educate.

The courts, thankfully, flushed the whole thing as not just lacking compassion and understanding, but also unconstitutional before it could go into effect.

Yet its stench still lingers.

Surely, Yarbrough’s gotten a whiff.

Surely, he smelled the reek of anti-brown immigrant bills wafting through the state capital since the start of this legislative session and tasted the stink of HB 56 resurrected under the guise of protecting you and me.

Those new bills, opponents profess, conflict with scripture.

Including the one Yarbrough touts — the one declaring that many “will hear about all these decrees and say …”

If his bill and others in its stalking horse, unfounded vein are enacted and Trump’s hellish deportation command continues, many will undoubtedly say:

Surely this nation — or this state — are not great, nor are their people wise or understanding.

Surely.

Let’s be better tomorrow than we are today. My column appears on AL.com, and digital editions of The Birmingham News, Huntsville Times, and Mobile Press-Register. Tell me what you think at [email protected], and follow me at twitter.com/roysj, Instagram @roysj and BlueSky.