Oklahoma Republican Introduces Shortest, Most Racist Bill You’ve Ever Read
An Oklahoma Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would label many people of color as “terrorists.”
State Representative J.J. Humphrey introduced House Bill 3133 on Tuesday. The remarkably short measure (the body of the bill is just 20 lines long) would create a new category of people considered terrorists within the Sooner State.
The first criterion to belong to this new category: be a person “of Hispanic descent living within the state of Oklahoma.”
If the person is also a “member of a criminal street gang” and “has been convicted of a gang-related offense,” they would be considered a terrorist. The punishment for terrorism would be forfeiting all assets, including all property, vehicles, and money.
The bill is clearly intended to target a wide range of people of Hispanic or Latino descent, including Afrolatino people. Police and prosecutors are far more likely to deem Black and Latino people as gang members than white people, meaning that people of color are more likely to have been accused or convicted of something considered terrorism.
If the concern was simply punishing acts of terrorism, there would be no reason to explicitly call out Hispanic people in the text.
Humphrey gave a weak apology after widespread backlash from Oklahoma Democratic lawmakers and social media users, but he refused to back down.
“I apologize for using the word Hispanic, but I was not wrong. Again, these are Hispanic,” he said. “Reality is they are Hispanic. There’s nothing to be ashamed with.”
Humphrey said he would change the bill so that it says “undocumented here illegally, or something like that” instead of Hispanic, which is not any better.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director of the American Immigration Council, slammed Humphrey’s proposed change.
“There are many people who claim that all they care about is violation of immigration law but when you dig deeper it’s just garden-variety bigotry,” Reichlin-Melnick wrote on social media.