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US/Alabama: 'No Way to Live' Under Immigrant Law
Repeal Act That ‘Attacks Every Aspect’ of Unauthorized Immigrant's Life
NEW YORK
Alabama's new immigrant act denies unauthorized immigrants and their families, including US citizen children, their basic rights, threatening their access to everyday necessities and equal protection of the law, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 52-page report, "No Way to Live: Alabama's Immigrant Law," documents the effect of the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer Citizen and Protection Act, commonly known as HB 56, on unauthorized immigrants and their families, as well as the larger Alabama communities in which they live. It is based in part on first-hand accounts by 57 Alabama residents, including citizens and permanent residents, who reported abuse or discrimination under the law.
One of HB 56's sponsors declared during debate that the law "attacks every aspect of an illegal alien's life." In seeking to drive unauthorized immigrants from the state, the law does not in any way acknowledge that many have lived in the state for years and have deep and extensive ties to the state through US citizen family, work, and community life.
"Many of the unauthorized immigrants we met and their families are deeply attached to the state," said Grace Meng, researcher for the US Program at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. "Their children are obviously affected, but we also met a teacher who fought back tears as she described her students' fears, a minister who lost 75 percent of his congregation, and a Latino permanent resident who was stopped by a state trooper for no reason except ethnicity."
Many unauthorized immigrants and their families have left the state, and those who remain find life increasingly difficult, Human Rights Watch found. Under the Beason-Hammon Act, unauthorized immigrants are prohibited from entering into "business transactions" with the state. An unauthorized immigrant who tries to do so is committing a Class C felony, punishable by 1 to 10 years in prison and up to $15,000 in fines. As a result, state and local agencies have declared that unauthorized immigrants cannot sign up for water and other utilities, live in the mobile homes they own, or renew licenses for their own small businesses.
Several people reported to Human Rights Watch that victims of crimes were afraid to report them to the authorities. Some who had been victims of wage theft felt they could not recover those wages because the law denies unauthorized immigrants the right to enforce contracts in Alabama's courts. They also cannot be granted bail, no matter how minor the offense.
The new law has given police and private citizens effective license to discriminate against unauthorized immigrants, as well as minority US citizens and permanent residents, Human Rights Watch found. A young man who is an unauthorized immigrant described being stopped and arrested by the police for not having a driver's license, and being told repeatedly by the officer, "You have no rights." An employee at a major store told a permanent resident that she could not fill her prescription there because she is not a US citizen. A US citizen mother reported that her native-born US citizen daughter came home crying from school one day because her classmate had told her she had to go back to Mexico.
Human Rights Watch also documented numerous ways the law harms Alabama's children. Although a provision that requires schools to check students' immigration status was temporarily blocked by a federal court, many families withdrew their children from school and fled the state. Those left behind are fearful and anxious, Human Rights Watch found. One mother said that her Alabama-born daughter no longer feels she belongs and asks, "Why are we here? They don't want us." Several parents reported making the difficult decision not to go to medical appointments for fear of being stopped while driving. One of them said she was even afraid to get on the road to take her daughter to the hospital when she had an asthma attack.
Alabama's law has also begun to affect the state's economy and its image. Farmers report a shortage of workers, businesses that rely on immigrant communities are struggling, and foreign companies are reconsidering their investments.
While every country has the authority to regulate the entry of immigrants into its territory, to deport those who have made an unauthorized entry, and to enforce its immigration laws against those no longer authorized to remain, international law requires that everyone is entitled to fundamental human rights by virtue of their humanity, Human Rights Watch said. The fact that the law infringes on the rights of children, and potentially thousands of minority citizens and legal residents, is additional reason for concern.
As the report went to press, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange recommended that the state legislature modify or repeal some provisions of the law. He also issued guidance letters to state agencies to limit the impact of the law regarding access to utilities and housing. Some legislators have expressed support for modification or repeal, while others oppose any weakening of the law whatsoever. Litigation over the law continues in state and federal courts over the constitutionality of several provisions. Meanwhile, uncertainty about the law's implementation fuels fears among Alabama's unauthorized immigrants and their families.
A coalition of local and national immigrant rights' organizations plans to gather on December 17, 2011, at the State Capitol in Montgomery to protest the law and call for a full repeal.
Most of the unauthorized immigrants Human Rights Watch interviewed have lived in the US for at least 10 years, and many have US citizen children. These numbers are mirrored nationwide, as recent research shows nearly two-thirds of unauthorized immigrants have lived in the US at least 10 years, and nearly half are parents of minor children. What is happening in Alabama demonstrates that enforcement-only efforts targeted at unauthorized immigrants are likely also to compromise the rights of US citizens and permanent residents and to harm the communities and economies that depend on them.
"Over and over in Alabama, we heard immigrants assert their humanity and declare, 'Legal or illegal, I'm human,'" Meng said. "Alabama should recognize the humanity and fundamental rights of all the state's residents and immediately repeal the Beason-Hammon Act."
Human Rights Watch is one of the world's leading independent organizations dedicated to defending and protecting human rights. By focusing international attention where human rights are violated, we give voice to the oppressed and hold oppressors accountable for their crimes. Our rigorous, objective investigations and strategic, targeted advocacy build intense pressure for action and raise the cost of human rights abuse. For 30 years, Human Rights Watch has worked tenaciously to lay the legal and moral groundwork for deep-rooted change and has fought to bring greater justice and security to people around the world.
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A group of Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday demanded the termination of US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, as new footage emerged in Minneapolis of federal immigration officers drawing guns on unarmed observers.
More than a dozen Democrats serving in the US House of Representatives stood outside the Washington, DC headquarters of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Tuesday and demanded that President Donald Trump fire Noem, who has taken heat for making false claims in recent weeks about Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both of whom were gunned down by federal agents last month.
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) delivered a brief speech at the event where she described her home city of Minneapolis as being under "occupation" by federal agents sent by Trump and Noem.
"We do not exaggerate when we say we have schools where two-thirds of the students are afraid to go to school," she said. "We do not exaggerate when we say we have people who are afraid to go to the hospital because our hospitals have occupying paramilitary forces. We do not exaggerate when we say our restaurants are shutting down because there are not enough people to drive the employees to work and from work."
Omar went on to reiterate her past calls to abolish ICE, which she described as "not just rogue, but unlawful." She also said that “Democrats are ready and willing to impeach" Noem if Trump doesn't fire her.
Later in the event, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) spoke of his meeting last week with Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old boy from Minneapolis who had been detained at a Texas ICE facility before a judge last weekend ordered his release.
"While detained, he became lethargic and sick," Castro said, speaking of Ramos. "His father said that he'd become depressed. He was asking about his mother and his classmates, and most of all, he wanted to go home. But he also said that he was scared of the guards... he had clearly been traumatized."
Castro emphasized that, even though Ramos and his father have been freed from detention, there are still too many children being held at the facility, including at least one as young as two years old
"This is a machinery of cruelty and viciousness that Secretary Noem has overseen, the Trump administration has built, and people like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott have been complicit in upholding," he said. "We must not allow ICE to kidnap children and bring them to prisons where they profit off their pain, misery, and suffering."
As Democrats were making their case for Noem's removal, new footage emerged of federal immigration officers in Minneapolis pulling legal observers out of their cars at gun point.
In a video posted on social media by independent journalist Ford Fischer, agents can be seen swarming a vehicle with their guns drawn and demanding and its passengers exit the car.
Just now: ICE agents pull handguns and arrest observers who had been following them this morning in Minneapolis. pic.twitter.com/s3uIwWS3AA
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) February 3, 2026
After the observers were pulled from the vehicle and detained by officers on the scene, one officer in the video claims that the people in question had been threatening them with "hand guns."
An observer then asks the officer if he means that the people being taken into custody were waving firearms at them, and he replies that they were making fake guns with their fingers, not brandishing actual weapons.
As the officers left the scene, they were heckled by protesters.
"Put away your weapons you douchebag, nobody is threatening you!" yelled one.
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"I think the DOE's attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment," said one expert.
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Less than a week after NPR revealed that "the Trump administration has overhauled a set of nuclear safety directives and shared them with the companies it is charged with regulating, without making the new rules available to the public," the US Department of Energy announced Monday that it is allowing firms building experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews.
Citing executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in May, a notice published in the Federal Register states that the DOE "is establishing a categorical exclusion for authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors for inclusion in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing procedures."
NEPA has long been a target of energy industries and Republican elected officials, including Trump. The exemption policy has been expected since Trump's May orders—which also launched a DOE pilot program to rapidly build the experimental reactors—and the department said in a statement that even the exempted reactors will face some reviews.
"The US Department of Energy is establishing the potential option to obtain a streamlined approach for advanced nuclear reactors as part of the environmental review performed under NEPA," the DOE said. "The analysis on each reactor being considered will be informed by previously completed environmental reviews for similar advanced nuclear technologies."
"The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents."
However, the DOE announcement alarmed various experts, including Daniel P. Aldrich, director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University, who wrote on social media: "Making America unsafe again: Trump created an exclusion for new experimental reactors from disclosing how their construction and operation might harm the environment, and from a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident."
Foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen described the policy as "terrifying," while Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group and a scholar at the University of Sussex's Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, called it "truly crazy."
As NPR reported Monday:
Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real-world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they're built.
"The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents," Lyman said.
"I think the DOE's attempts to cut corners on safety, security, and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety, and our natural environment here in the United States," he added.
Lyman was also among the experts who criticized changes that NPR exposed last week, after senior editor and correspondent Geoff Brumfiel obtained documents detailing updates to "departmental orders, which dictate requirements for almost every aspect of the reactors' operations—including safety systems, environmental protections, site security, and accident investigations."
While the DOE said that it shared early versions of the rules with companies, "the reduction of unnecessary regulations will increase innovation in the industry without jeopardizing safety," and "the department anticipates publicly posting the directives later this year," Brumfiel noted that the orders he saw weren't labeled as drafts and had the word "approved" on their cover pages.
In a lengthy statement about last week's reporting, Lyman said on the Union of Concerned Scientists website that "this deeply troubling development confirms my worst fears about the dire state of nuclear power safety and security oversight under the Trump administration. Such a brazen rewriting of hundreds of crucial safeguards for the public underscores why preservation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as an independent, transparent nuclear regulator is so critical."
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“There’s very little in our product portfolio that has benefited from tariffs,” said the CEO of one North Carolina-based steel product company.
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US President Donald Trump pledged that the manufacturing industry would come "roaring back into our country" after what he called "Liberation Day" last April, which was marked by the announcement of sweeping tariffs on imported goods—a policy that has shifted constantly in the past 10 months as Trump has changed rates, canceled tariffs, and threatened new ones.
But after promising to turn around economic trends that have developed over decades—the shipping of jobs overseas, automation, and the obliteration of towns and cities that had once been manufacturing centers—Trump's trade policy appears to have put any progress achieved in the sector in recent years "in reverse," as the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.
Federal data shows that in each of the eight months that followed Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, manufacturing companies reduced their workforce, with a total of 72,000 jobs in the industry lost since April 2025.
The Census Bureau also estimates that construction spending in the manufacturing industry contracted in the first nine months of Trump's second term, after surging during the Biden administration due to investments in renewable energy and semiconductor chips.
"But the tariffs haven’t helped," said Hanson.
Trump has insisted that his tariff policy would force companies to manufacture goods domestically to avoid paying more for foreign materials—just as he has claimed consumers would see lower prices.
But numerous analyses have shown American families are paying more, not less, for essentials like groceries as companies have passed on their higher operating costs to consumers, and federal data has made clear that companies are also avoiding investing in labor since Trump introduced the tariffs—while the trade war the president has kicked off hasn't changed the realities faced by many manufacturing sectors.
"While tariffs do reduce import competition, they can also increase the cost of key components for domestic manufacturers," wrote Emma Ockerman at Yahoo Finance. "Take US electric vehicle plants that rely on batteries made with rare earth elements imported from overseas, for instance. Some parts simply aren’t made in the United States."
At the National Interest, Ryan Mulholland of the Center for American Progress wrote that Trump's tariffs have created "three overlapping challenges" for US businesses.
"The imported components and materials needed to produce goods domestically now cost more—in some cases, a lot more," wrote Mulholland. "Foreign buyers are now looking elsewhere, often to protest Trump’s global belligerence, costing US firms market share abroad that will be difficult to win back. And if bad policy wasn’t enough, US manufacturers must also contend with the Trump administration’s unpredictability, which has made long-term investment decisions nearly impossible. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that small business bankruptcies have surged to their highest level in years."
Trump's unpredictable threats of new tariffs and his retreats on the policy, as with European countries in recent weeks when he said he would impose new levies on countries that didn't support his push to take control of Greenland, have also led to "a lost year for investment" for many firms, along with the possibility that the US Supreme Court could soon rule against the president's tariffs.
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Constantly changing tariff rates make it "very difficult for businesses... to plan," said Baker. “I think you’ve had a lot of businesses curtail investment plans because they just don’t know whether the plans will make sense.”
While US manufacturers have struggled to compete globally, China and other countries have continued exporting their goods.
“There’s very little in our product portfolio that has benefited from tariffs,” H.O. Woltz III, chief executive of North Carolina-based Insteel Industries, told the Wall Street Journal.
US Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) noted Monday that the data on manufacturing job losses comes a week after Vice President JD Vance visited his home state to tout "record job growth."
"Here’s the reality: Families face higher costs, tariffs are costing manufacturing jobs, and over $200 million in approved federal infrastructure and manufacturing investments here were cut by this administration," said Kaptur. "Ohio deserves better."
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