Red-state immigration crackdowns stall amid business and faith backlash

A wave of anti-immigrant legislation swept through red states this year, but most of the roughly 200 bills introduced to target immigrants stalled or died as business groups and Christian leaders pushed back. The fight exposed a split inside the Republican coalition: restrictionists pressed for sharper enforcement, while employers and churches warned that broad crackdowns could damage labor supply, local economies and ordinary charitable work.

Much of the battle centered on E-Verify, the federal work-authorization system that lawmakers in more than a dozen states considered mandating in 2025. Florida’s Republican-majority legislature weighed several versions of an expanded mandate, even as Gov. Ron DeSantis said in March 2025 that teenage workers could replace immigrant labor. The U.S. House passed an E-Verify mandate in its 2023 immigration overhaul, but the measure failed in the Senate. Business groups, especially in agriculture and hospitality, argued that tighter verification rules would trigger worker shortages and raise costs for state economies.

In Tennessee, the backlash came from churches and nonprofits that said lawmakers were blurring immigration enforcement with religious and charitable work. One bill would have made it a felony to “transport, encourage or induce” immigrants without legal status, a charge that could have reached church staff, nonprofit employees or private company workers and carried up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $3,000. A second bill would have opened charitable organizations to lawsuits if they provided housing to someone without permanent legal immigration status who later committed a crime. Faith leaders said those proposals threatened religious freedom and the ability to provide basic care.

Alabama showed how quickly the politics could stall. Lawmakers there considered seven immigration-related bills in 2026, after two measures passed in 2025, but none of the new proposals became law. At least five bills targeting immigrants were introduced, even though Alabama’s foreign-born population was estimated at about 4.5 percent, far below the national figure of 14.8 percent. The state’s debate underscored how immigration politics often advanced faster than the local demographic realities.

Some Republican-led states still moved ahead with enforcement measures. Florida and Tennessee established state-level immigration enforcement offices, while Colorado counties sued the state over sanctuary policies and Indiana sued one of its counties over immigration enforcement. Nationally, President Donald Trump’s renewed deportation push focused first on the roughly 750,000 people with open deportation orders signed by a judge, keeping pressure on state lawmakers even as employers and faith groups argued that sweeping crackdowns were bad governance as well as bad economics.