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| Texas is making it a lot riskier to protest new pipelines. |
| The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act, a new measure passed by the state legislature, would increase penalties for damaging or interfering with oil or gas pipelines and related infrastructure, in some cases allowing felony charges, stiff fines and jail time of up to 10 years. Punishable offenses include entering such facilities without permission and the intention to cause damage. |
| Organizations involved in protests could be hit with penalties of $500,000. |
| Gov. Greg Abbott has yet to sign the bill, but he has signaled no opposition and it will most likely go into effect on Sept. 1. |
| The bill resembles those already passed by a half-dozen states, including Louisiana, North Dakota and South Dakota. Those measures, which have proliferated in the wake of protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline, have much in common with a model infrastructure protection act drawn up by the business-backed American Legislative Exchange Council. |
| The Trump administration, too, has proposed legislation along the lines of the ALEC model as part of a pipeline safety reauthorization bill. |
| The trend clearly worries civil liberties organizations. Some, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, have begun legal challenges. |
| Kate Ruane, senior legislative counsel for the A.C.L.U., said that "they all have the same effect, which is to chill protests and protesting activity that the government doesn't like." |
| While the sponsors of the pipeline bills say they are essential to fight destructive protests, Marla Marcum, a founder and director of the Climate Disobedience Center, noted that trespassing and vandalism were already illegal. The new laws, she said, are written in such "overly broad" ways that they won't simply prevent damage to infrastructure but will have the practical effect of chilling constitutionally protected activism. |
| "The primary intent is to suppress dissent," she said, and "to paint dissent as an illegal act." |
| State Senator Brian Birdwell, a Republican who sponsored the bill in the Texas Legislature's upper chamber, suggested its impact would ultimately depend on prosecutorial discretion. "These offenses, the penalties are ceilings, not floors," Senator Birdwell said, according to The Texas Observer. |
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