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Tex. Health and Safety Code § 81.089

This is the official text of Tex. Health and Safety Code § 81.089, part of Texas’s Health and Safety Code — covers public health and safety regulation.

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§ 81.089. TRANSPORTATION; CRIMINAL PENALTY.

Official statutory text

(a) A person commits an offense if, before notifying the department or health authority at a port of entry or a place of first landing or first arrival in this state, the person knowingly or intentionally:

(1) transports or causes to be transported into this state an object the person knows or suspects may be infected or contaminated with a communicable disease that is a threat to the public health;

(2) transports or causes to be transported into this state an individual who the person knows has or is the carrier of a communicable disease that is a threat to the public health; or

(3) transports or causes to be transported into this state a person, animal, or object in a private or common carrier or a private conveyance that the person knows is or suspects may be infected or contaminated with a communicable disease that is a threat to the public health.

(b) An offense under this section is a Class A misdemeanor, except that if the person acts with the intent to harm or defraud another, the offense is a felony of the third degree.

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

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About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.