Rick Perry’s about to get hit on a new front for his record on immigration policy — this time from tea party groups back home in Texas.
The Texas Tea Party Caucus Advisory Board, a citizen group that advises the caucus’s 27 state legislators, will attack Perry for being insufficiently tough on so-called sanctuary cities at a press conference next week.
Perry’s been under attack by his presidential rivals for a state law allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates at Texas public colleges and universities and his opposition to building a border fence. Now supporters of a bill that would have allowed state and local law enforcement to inquire about the immigration status of people they detain are hoping to get that into the discussion as well.
Perry supported the bill and even set it as an “emergency” item. But the governor but didn’t do enough to get legislators to pass it, said Katrina Pierson, a tea party caucus advisory board member from suburban Dallas who met with Perry in June to ask him to institute the regulations by executive order.
Pierson said her group is planning to announce next week that it has increased support from lawmakers and will call on Perry to call another special session to address the matter, hoping that he would “clarify his position on illegal immigration.”
“If he can’t get the job done in Texas with a supermajority, with something that he says is a priority, how is he going to get that done in D.C.?” Pierson said. “You have control of everything in Texas, and you still can’t it done. He doesn’t want to get it done.”
Until he entered the presidential race, Perry’s position was seen as well within the conservative mainstream in Texas. He directed more state resources toward patrolling the border and this year signed a bill allowing retired Texas Rangers and retired state troopers to help protect the border. The in-state tuition bill, which Perry signed in 2001 after it overwhelmingly passed the Democratic-led state House and GOP-controlled state Senate, wasn’t a significant issue in any of his three subsequent campaigns and is not considered controversial in Texas even by those who oppose it.
But now that Perry’s immigration record has become a national issue, it’s become a local issue as well — and even Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who’s running for Senate, has backed away from Perry on in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, telling a local Dallas television station on Monday “I would not have signed that law.”
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