'Immigration harboring' bills raise question: When does helping become a crime?

State lawmakers have introduced a slate of immigration-enforcement bills this session, including House Bill 1037, which would create state felonies for harboring or transporting undocumented immigrants.

Sponsored by Rep. Becky Currie, R-Brookhaven, the measure is part of a broader effort by state Republicans to align Mississippi law with the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement agenda—and part of a wave of similar legislation in Republican-led states across the South.

The bill would establish two new crimes: “unlawful human harboring” and “unlawful human smuggling.” Anyone who knowingly conceals, harbors or shields an undocumented person from detection—or transports them knowing they lack authorization—could face up to 15 years in prison and fines up to $30,000. The legislation does not include exceptions for family members, clergy, employers or medical transport.

The proposal is modeled on Florida’s SB 1718, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2023, which makes it a third-degree felony to knowingly transport an undocumented person into Florida. That law’s original draft included broader harboring provisions, but pushback from faith groups and business interests narrowed its scope before passage. Mississippi’s version goes further, criminalizing harboring within the state—not just transportation across state lines.

Similar bills have emerged in Missouri and Alabama, part of what advocates describe as a coordinated push for state-level immigration enforcement. Alabama’s SB 53 would criminalize harboring and allow civil asset forfeiture for those caught aiding undocumented individuals.

The case for state enforcement

Currie, who chairs the House Corrections Committee, argues that the federal government has failed to adequately enforce existing immigration laws. “My job is to make economic opportunities for Mississippians,” she said at a 2010 immigration forum. “If you are here on a work visa and you are here legally, welcome. But the day your visa runs out is the day you leave the country and come back legally.” She has cited concerns about unauthorized employment, document fraud, and what she has described as gang activity and human trafficking in her district.

Currie previously claimed a need for “more teeth” in Mississippi’s E-Verify law and cited what she characterized as problems with harboring undocumented immigrants in her home district.

Supporters of state-level enforcement argue that measures like HB 1037 complement federal law rather than conflict with it. Federal law under 8 U.S.C. § 1324 already criminalizes harboring and transporting undocumented immigrants. Proponents contend that state penalties add an additional enforcement mechanism where federal resources are limited. DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton, who backed a separate bounty hunter bill this session, has framed such measures as advancing President Trump’s stated objective of deporting “as many people who are here illegally as possible.”

The legal landscape

The bill faces significant legal hurdles. Courts have repeatedly held that immigration enforcement is primarily a federal domain, and state laws that create parallel criminal penalties have faced constitutional challenges on preemption grounds.

In May 2024, U.S. District Judge Roy Altman—a Trump appointee—blocked Florida’s transportation provision, ruling that federal courts have “uniformly ruled that prohibitions on transportation, harboring, and inducement of unlawfully present aliens fall into a preempted field.” The American Immigration Council, which helped bring the challenge alongside the Americans for Immigrant Justice, the ACLU of Florida, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, argued the law was so vague it could sweep in families visiting across state lines, coworkers carpooling, and churches transporting congregation members.

The Supreme Court’s 2012 decision in Arizona v. United States struck down several provisions of Arizona’s SB 1070 on preemption grounds, holding that states cannot create their own immigration crimes that parallel federal offenses. The court did uphold a provision allowing police to check immigration status during stops but emphasized that “the Federal Government has occupied the field of alien registration.” The Yale Law Journal has noted that the court’s recent approach may open more space for state enforcement, though scholars remain divided on whether the current court—or lower courts under the Trump administration’s influence—might take a different view.

Rep. Jansen Owen, R-Poplarville, vice chairman of the House Judiciary B Committee, has expressed skepticism about some of this session’s immigration proposals, citing constitutional concerns about state government overreach—an unusual position for a Republican lawmaker in a session dominated by enforcement-minded legislation.

The anti-commandeering doctrine, rooted in the Tenth Amendment, holds that the federal government cannot compel states to enforce federal law. But the inverse question—whether states can create their own parallel enforcement regimes—remains contested territory in the courts.

Fear in immigrant communities

For immigrant families in Mississippi, the legislative proposals have compounded fears already heightened by the return of Trump administration enforcement policies. Within a week of taking office, federal agents arrested at least 20 undocumented immigrants in multiple Mississippi locations, detaining them in Madison County.

“It’s been very hard for me. Truthfully, in 20-plus years I never thought I would see some of this,” L. Patricia Ice, director of the legal project at the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, told Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “People who are currently undocumented here have expressed concern, and some of the other people who are in the middle of their process of becoming permanent residents and or citizens are very, very afraid.”

Ice noted that MIRA’s annual civic engagement day at the Capitol drew smaller crowds this year. “People expressed fear about coming here,” she said. Ice helped co-establish MIRA in 2000 and has spent more than two decades advocating for immigrant rights in the state.

Mississippi has recent and vivid experience with large-scale federal immigration enforcement. On Aug. 7, 2019—the first day of school for many Mississippi children—Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducted raids at seven poultry processing plants across central Mississippi, detaining approximately 680 workers. It remains the largest single-day workplace immigration enforcement action in U.S. history.

More than half of those detained—342 people—worked at the Koch Foods plant in Morton alone. Children returned from school to find their parents gone. School superintendent Tony McGee scrambled with Child Protective Services to ensure students had somewhere to go. A tearful plea from an 11-year-old girl named Magdalena went viral, becoming a symbol of family separation.

Five years later, families in Morton and Forest are still rebuilding their lives. Community organizations like El Pueblo continue to assist affected families with food drives, clothing, and interpretation services.

The companies themselves faced minimal consequences. While four executives at two smaller plants were indicted in 2020, no charges were brought against Koch Foods or PECO Foods—companies whose executives had donated thousands of dollars to top Mississippi officials. Three plant managers eventually received probation for “harboring illegal aliens.” A Mississippi Today investigation found that deteriorated working conditions persist in the industry, and that it remains possible to find employment without work authorization.

The poultry industry accounts for the largest percentage of Mississippi’s agricultural economy, employing more than 25,000 people across the state.

A contested historical parallel

Some critics of the legislation have drawn parallels to an earlier period in American history when federal law criminalized assistance to people deemed to have no legal right to be where they were.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 imposed criminal penalties on anyone who harbored escaped slaves or refused to assist in their capture: fines of $1,000 (equivalent to nearly $38,000 today) and up to six months’ imprisonment. The law required citizens to assist federal marshals in apprehending freedom seekers and stripped accused fugitives of the right to testify in their own defense or receive a jury trial. Federal commissioners who ruled in favor of slaveholders received $10; those who released the accused received only $5.

Supporters of immigration enforcement reject the analogy as inflammatory and historically inappropriate, arguing that enforcing democratically enacted immigration laws bears no resemblance to enforcing the institution of slavery. They note that federal immigration law reflects the sovereign right of nations to control their borders—a principle recognized across the political spectrum.

But scholars who study the intersection of immigration law and civil rights history have noted structural parallels worth examining. Both legal regimes criminalize acts of human assistance—shelter, transportation, concealment. Both conscript ordinary citizens into enforcement. Both involve federal-state tensions over who controls the movement of people. And both raise the question of what happens when compliance with law conflicts with conscience.

The Fugitive Slave Act provoked Northern resistance. Vermont, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and other states passed “personal liberty laws” designed to nullify or obstruct federal enforcement. Jury nullification became common. The Underground Railroad became more organized and efficient, not less. Abolitionists argued that a “higher law“ superseded unjust statutes. The severity of the 1850 act, historians have noted, “defeated its purpose” by galvanizing opposition.

Today, some states have moved in the opposite direction from Mississippi—passing “sanctuary“ policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, though recent court rulings have constrained their scope. The tensions between federal enforcement priorities and local values continue to play out across the country. State lawmakers in California, Colorado, New York and elsewhere have introduced measures allowing residents to sue federal immigration agents for civil rights violations.

A session of immigration proposals

HB 1037 is not the only immigration measure before the legislature this session, though several companion bills have already died.

House Bill 1484, the “Mississippi Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program,” would have created a $1,000 reward system for tips leading to the apprehension of undocumented immigrants, along with a state-certified bounty hunter program to track and detain them. The bill classified unauthorized presence as “trespassing”—a felony punishable by life imprisonment unless deportation occurred within 24 hours. It died in committee on February 4, 2025, after legal experts and even some Republican lawmakers questioned its constitutionality and workability.

“It just doesn’t pass muster,” Patricia Ice told the Mississippi Free Press. “There are so many things wrong with it.”

Immigration attorney Larissa Davis, based in Flowood, called the bounty hunter bill “a complete waste of resources and money,” describing it as more of a political stunt than a good-faith attempt at legislating.

Other measures that failed to advance include bills creating an “illegal immigration enforcement unit” within state government and penalizing Mississippians for transporting undocumented migrants into the state. MIRA called the death of these bills “a huge win for immigrants here in Mississippi,” attributing the outcome to sustained advocacy. Organizer Nataly Camacho praised the coalition’s efforts.

The status of HB 1037 as committee deadlines approach remains uncertain. Similar legislation sponsored by Currie has failed in past sessions.

Questions remain, including whether compassion can be criminalized

The debate over Mississippi’s immigration legislation touches on both new questions and others that have recurred throughout American history: What is the proper relationship between state and federal authority? When does enforcement become persecution? And what obligations do citizens have when law and conscience diverge?

For families in Morton and Forest still recovering from 2019, for workers in poultry plants across the Delta, for churches and employers and neighbors trying to navigate an uncertain legal landscape, these are not abstract questions. They are the conditions of daily life.

The historical record suggests that laws compelling citizens to participate in the apprehension of vulnerable people tend to generate resistance—and that the long arc of American law has generally bent away from such compulsions. But the short arc is less predictable, and Mississippi’s 2026 session will test which direction the state chooses to bend.