As the Montana legislature wraps up, Governor Greg Gianforte is signing several bills intended to address people in the United States without documentation.
One of the most prominent bills, House Bill 278, authorizes law enforcement to determine a driver’s residency status at a traffic stop if the driver is under suspicion of a crime and requires law enforcement to report undocumented status to a federal agency. In its former draft, the bill would have required an officer to check immigration status in case of a suspected crime.
Representative Nelly Nicol of Billings said she sponsored the bill with the intention of empowering Montana Highway Patrol to intervene in suspected cases of human trafficking.
“This law just by rewriting the intention just changes it so that they can then overwrite those policies and then they will legally be able to ask,” she said.
According to U.S. Department of Justice data, 95 percent of human traffickers prosecuted in district court in 2022 were U.S. citizens.
The Billings Police Department and the Montana Department of Justice on behalf of the Montana Highway Patrol say the law leaves their procedures untouched, but advocates in some of Montana’s largest communities say laws that emphasize immigration status concern them as potential contributors to racial profiling.
LaChelle Amos with Lutheran Family Services in Billings works with refugees vetted through the country’s refugee resettlement system and says she’s reminding families of the importance of carrying documents that prove their residency status.
“So that there’s not any potential confusion that stems from not being able to immediately show proof of lawful presence,” she said.
Other new laws include House Bill 226, which requires an employer to verify a potential employee’s legal ability to work in the United States and establishes penalties, and House Bill 214, which allows the state to prosecute people implicated for federal immigration violations for crimes committed within the state.
