EL PASO, Texas (Border Report) – Activists in at least four Texas cities used the International Workers Day holiday to call for the legalization of some 1.5 million undocumented workers in the state.

The activists from Border Network for Human Rights and several other organizations also called for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to stop targeting these workers and other economic migrants coming across the Rio Grande through state laws such as SB4 and the deployment of thousands of state National Guard troops to the border under Operation Lone Star.

“Texas is shooting itself in the foot by persecuting the construction workers, farmworkers, landscapers, cooks and other immigrant workers who pay nearly $2 billion in taxes and hold the state economy together,” said Fernando Garcia, executive director of BNHR. “We will continue to fight for those workers’ rights.”

The Texas Legislature passed SB4 last year banning local governments from prohibiting police officers from asking people’s immigration status. Federal courts have halted enforcement of SB4 until they determine if it is constitutional.

Abbott endorsed SB4 in response to what he considers inaction on the part of the Biden administration to enforce immigration laws amid a years-long historic spike in unlawful crossings at the border. The governor in March celebrated the third anniversary of the launch of Operation Lone Star, which his office says has led to 40,400 criminal arrests, 36,100 felony charges and the seizure of 469 million potentially lethal doses of fentanyl.

But on Wednesday, a group of men, women and children holding “No SB4” signs gathered at San Jacinto Plaza in Downtown El Paso. Similar protests were going on simultaneously in two South Texas cities and Houston, Garcia said.

“This country was built by immigrants, by those who came through Ellis Island a long time ago and those who came here later. We need (immigration reform) because even though they need us immigrant workers, they don’t pay us the same; sometimes they don’t pay us and threaten to call immigration on us,” he said.

The Pew Research Center put the undocumented population in the U.S. at 10.5 million in late 2021 and said California and Texas had the highest number of unauthorized non-citizens with 1.9 million and 1.6 million, respectively.

Theft of immigrant workers’ wages is real, officials with the U.S. Labor Department have told Border Report. In August of 2022, the department’s Wage and Hour Division’s assistant district director in El Paso signed a memorandum of understanding with the Mexican consulate to educate immigrant workers about their rights and to promptly investigate wage theft claims.

In El Paso, most wage-theft claims stem from non-payment of overtime in a variety of industries, most commonly those that are “labor intensive,” the department said, meaning individuals who work with their hands as opposed to office workers.

International Workers’ Day, also known as May Day, commemorates an 1886 general strike in Chicago demanding an 8-hour workday. Violence erupted a short time later, resulting in the deaths of police officers and workers.