Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs issued her first veto of the legislative session on Monday, rejecting a Republican proposal that many were calling "the new SB 1070." The bill would have allowed local law enforcement to crack down on illegal immigration, making it a state crime to cross the border outside of a port of entry.

It harkens to another new law passed in Texas just a few months ago, the now notorious SB 4, which was just temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court. In the wake of that law, migrant arrests plummeted in Texas in January. At the same time, they soared in Arizona and California.

It was yet another new pattern that has emerged in recent months as record numbers of migrants have presented themselves at U.S. borders, seeking asylum. But, was it in response to the restrictive immigration laws passed in the Texas state house?

Reporter Andrea Castillo asked that question in a recent piece for the LA Times and spoke with The Show about it.

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times

LA Times reporter Andrea Castillo.

Interview highlights

CASTILLO: So the experts that I talked to, named a number of factors that are leading to the shift. You know, they talked about these stepped up enforcement efforts by the governments in, in Mexico, in Panama and in Colombia. They also talked about this, you know, heightened cartel violence that has been seen in Mexico, in particular, right across the border from Texas. And so they think that those things have been sort of the primary factors that have slowed the migration, you know, to the Texas border.

Now, the restrictive policies in Texas they think are certainly, you know, another one of those factors that is contributing. and that's including that, you know, new state law that could still take effect this week.

The ACLU, other advocacy groups have issued official warnings from their groups to immigrants to avoid travel in Texas. What kind of role does that kind of thing play?

CASTILLO: Yeah. You know, it seems like this kind of thing can trickle, you know, across the Whatsapp groups and the other, you know, ways that migrants communicate pretty quickly. The people that I talked to said that these things just, they go through these networks so quickly that you could see that really having an effect on where people are choosing to go and how they're choo to get up to the U.S. border.

So, rhetoric — even more so than maybe what's on the books in Texas — seems to shape these things. The conversation even changes these patterns.

CASTILLO: Exactly. You know, this law in Texas hasn't even taken effect yet. So you can see that if this is playing a role, we're talking a couple of months before this is even reality that it's starting to affect the ways that people are choosing to, to arrive.

Tell me a little bit more about what's happening in California where you are. We've seen in Arizona, migrant aid networks completely overwhelmed. They're worried about funding running out now in terms of federal funding reaching the end of its line. What's it look like in California?

CASTILLO: Yeah, you know, it's pretty similar federal state funding has dwindled. There was a migrant welcome center in San Diego that, you know, ran through several million dollars in the course of a few months and closed. And they, you know, stated outright that the increase in migrants arriving to San Diego was a factor in why they closed earlier than they expected.

What about the Mexican government's stepped up enforcement? Can you tell us what led to that?

CASTILLO: So the U.S. has been working with the Mexican government in order to, you know, sort of alleviate the numbers of migrants that are, you know, arriving up in the northern border areas in, in Mexico and, and obviously trying to cross into the U.S. Mexican immigration enforcement has been pushing migrants further south. They have been preventing migrants as far south as the city of Tapachula, which borders Guatemala. You know, preventing those folks from, from moving further north into into Mexico. And what that has done is it has disrupted the migration patterns that go from Tapachula all the way up to Texas. And so instead, some migrants are choosing a different route which ends up bringing them to Arizona or to California.

Tell us more about the policy effect on this — not from a state level, but from a federal level. We just got past this big conversation about the bipartisan immigration bill that was presented in the Senate in Washington, D.C. as a compromise bill, but it was blocked by Senate Republicans. What effect would that have had? Are we seeing the fallout from that failure?

CASTILLO: Yeah. You know, [Department of Homeland Security] officials have been very outright in talking about how that bill would have helped them, you know, in terms of funding. It would have given them the funding that they needed to process migrants more quickly. One of the things that's been a major issue in California has been the issue of street releases where migrants are, you know, processed through Border Patrol and then released out to street locations. And left to sort of figure out what to do from there.

And so, you know, with more funding — say that they would have been able to coordinate these, these releases in a better way. Obviously that some of that funding would have gone to local organizations that directly help with the humanitarian effort of processing those migrants and helping them get to where they're going.

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