The Texas GOP has spent the last year quietly dismantling the systems that allowed 1.7 million undocumented people — along with tens of thousands of refugees and DACA recipients — to participate in everyday life. Not through big legislative votes. Not through public debate. Through regulatory rulemaking, executive orders, and backroom legal maneuvers designed to bypass the legislature entirely.
The result is a patchwork of new restrictions that have cut noncitizens off from commercial driver’s licenses, car registration, occupational licenses, and in-state college tuition.
More than 6,400 refugees and DACA recipients have already lost their commercial driver’s licenses. Thousands more are expected to lose the ability to work in industries that require state licensing — fields like construction, medicine, cosmetology, air conditioning repair, electrical work, and even dog breeding.
And the people engineering these changes are already looking at their next target: the 1982 Supreme Court ruling that guarantees undocumented children the right to attend public school.
How It Happened
What makes these changes especially alarming is how they were enacted. Most of them were originally introduced as bills during the last Texas legislative session. They failed. Even in a Republican-dominated legislature, the proposals didn’t have enough votes to pass.
So Governor Greg Abbott, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and a network of Abbott-appointed agency boards went around the process.
When a bill to strip in-state tuition from undocumented students stalled, Paxton teamed up with the federal Department of Justice to get the courts to overturn the existing law instead. Now students must prove they are “lawfully present” to qualify for in-state tuition, a change that threatens higher education access for as many as 18,500 students.
Some universities have already incorrectly told DACA recipients they no longer qualify, even though guidance from the state — which arrived months late — says otherwise. The confusion itself is doing damage.
In September, Abbott directed the Department of Public Safety to enforce English proficiency requirements for truck drivers and to stop issuing commercial driver’s licenses to non-English speakers.
Soon after, DPS announced it would no longer issue or renew commercial licenses for DACA recipients, refugees, or people with asylum — echoing a Trump administration policy that a federal court had already temporarily blocked for failing to explain how it would improve safety.
The Department of Motor Vehicles then tightened photo ID requirements for buying or registering a car, making it impossible for undocumented residents to legally own a vehicle.
And most recently, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation voted to bar most noncitizens from obtaining occupational licenses entirely — unless they hold a green card, have been granted asylum or refugee status, or are recognized as victims of human trafficking. DACA recipients are shut out completely.
Six of the seven commissioners who approved the occupational licensing change were appointed by Abbott. All nine members of the board that approved the car registration rule were his appointees.
The Human Cost
Behind each of these policy changes are real people whose lives are being gutted.
Lorena Chavarría founded DACS Academy, the first Spanish-language cosmetology school in Austin. The school — whose name stands for Dios Abriendo Caminos De Superación, or God Opening Paths to Overcoming — helps women, many of them undocumented and fleeing domestic violence, get trained, licensed, and financially independent.
Speaking through her daughter at a public hearing, Chavarría told agency commissioners that the women in her program who had escaped violence and hardship were now at risk of falling back into instability and economic dependence.
Behind every student, she said, are children, households, and dreams that depend on this one opportunity to build something better.
Those words landed on commissioners who had already made up their minds.
Car dealership owners serving predominantly Hispanic communities report plummeting sales. Pablo Higueros, president of the Texas United Auto and Community Alliance, says many customers are now traveling out of state to buy and register vehicles.
Others are driving unregistered, uninsured cars to get to work and school — which, in a state where local police work hand-in-hand with federal immigration authorities, creates a direct pipeline to deportation.
That’s not an accident. As Higueros put it: the state got smart. Drive an unregistered vehicle, get pulled over, and police now have probable cause to arrest you. From there, it’s ICE’s game.
The Quiet Power Grab
What’s happening in Texas is not just an immigration crackdown. It’s a case study in how executive power can be weaponized to circumvent the democratic process.
The proposals that couldn’t pass through the legislature — where even Republican members understood the economic consequences of cutting off the workforce — are now being imposed through agency rules, executive directives, and judicial end runs.
The governor’s office has consolidated authority over the agencies making these decisions, and the agencies are acting without legislative direction.
Rep. Ramon Romero, a Democrat from Fort Worth and chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, called it what it is: legislating through rulemaking. He pointed out that many of the same Republican lawmakers who voted down these measures understand that Texas’ construction, agriculture, and service industries depend heavily on immigrant labor.
They also know that more unregistered vehicles mean more uninsured drivers and higher costs for everyone.
But none of that matters when the governor can bypass the legislature and use his appointed boards to impose what the elected body wouldn’t.
Gloria Leal, general counsel for the League of United Latin American Citizens and a former state agency attorney, said the recent rule changes seem unusually self-generated — not the kind of thing agencies typically do without a bill directing them. The question she keeps coming back to: why the urgency?
What Comes Next
The answer may lie in a recent meeting at the White House. Senior adviser Stephen Miller reportedly grilled Texas GOP lawmakers on why they hadn’t yet passed a law to challenge Plyler v. Doe, the landmark Supreme Court decision requiring public schools to educate undocumented children regardless of status.
The legislature isn’t ready for that fight — at least not publicly. One Republican official, speaking anonymously, said the mainstream of the caucus doesn’t want to take away education from children who were brought to the country through no fault of their own.
But as every recent change in Texas has shown, the legislature doesn’t need to be ready. Paxton, Abbott, and the agency boards they control have already demonstrated they can work around the democratic process when it produces answers they don’t like. If they want to go after Plyler, the playbook is already written.
The Texas Republican Party that once prided itself on welcoming immigrants — the same party that in 2001 passed a law ensuring undocumented students could access in-state tuition — has now built a systematic apparatus to cut those same people out of public life.
Not all at once. One rule change at a time. One agency vote at a time. One court filing at a time.
Until there’s nothing left.