The Supremes got this one right. BTW, Biden opened the border by executive action and he can close it and deport the same way. He can blame the GOP all he wants but the crisis was his making.
Breaking News: Looks like another court stepped in yesterday and has blocked Texas from arresting and deporting! Wow...I'm on the edge of my seat. I need a bucket of popcorn.
Supreme Court Won’t Block Texas From Arresting, Deporting Immigrants
Justices reject Biden administration’s request to prevent Texas from exercising new border enforcement power
By Jess Bravin and Elizabeth Findell, WSJ
Updated March 19, 2024 4:58 pm ET
Migrants are taken into custody by officials at the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas.
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block Texas from implementing its own criminal law against illegal immigration, rejecting an emergency appeal from the Biden administration which argued that states can’t interfere with federal authority over the border.
The Texas law, known as SB 4, makes illegal border crossing a state crime and allows state officials to conduct deportations. The measure has been on hold as the Supreme Court weighed the government’s request to halt implementation while litigation over its legality proceeds in the lower courts. A federal district judge had enjoined the law, but the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans, said the law could go into effect at least for now.
The Supreme Court’s order in favor of Texas isn’t a final decision on the law’s constitutionality, but signals the state law may fare better than a similar Arizona statute that a less conservative Supreme Court struck down in 2012.
Three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from Tuesday’s order.
SB 4, signed into law in December, makes it a state crime for anyone without authorization to be in the U.S. to cross into Texas outside of a designated port of entry and allows state police and local judges to jail and deport violators.
The dispute over SB 4 reflects the increasing tension over border enforcement between Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the Biden administration. Abbott, asserting the federal government has abandoned its duty to protect the southern border, has pushed a range of measures, including the installation of barriers in and along the Rio Grande. The Biden administration repeatedly has turned to federal courts to block Abbott’s policies.
Under Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, the state has spent or allocated more than $11 billion since 2021 to deploy state troopers and National Guardsmen to the border, arrest migrants for trespassing on private land, bus migrants to northern cities and erect barriers along the Rio Grande.
Abbott, in a brief statement posted on social media, said the decision was a positive development.
In legal papers, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told the Supreme Court that SB 4 mirrors federal immigration law and should be viewed as a way to help Washington deal with a border crisis that has overwhelmed the national government’s resources.
Moreover, he wrote, Texas has a long history of acting on its own against foreign threats. In the 19th century, “Texas repeatedly responded with force against marauders who crossed into Texas from Mexico, both before and after Texas’s statehood,” he wrote.
The Biden administration, in its brief, said there was no legal authority for a single state to seize enforcement of immigration law from Washington.
“Authority to admit and remove noncitizens is a core responsibility of the National Government,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote, and “where Congress has enacted a law addressing those issues, state law is pre-empted.”
She cited more than a century of precedent, including the 2012 Arizona decision. She said that permitting each state to act in defiance of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act would sow chaos as state and federal officers worked at cross-purposes, undermine relations with Mexico and other foreign governments, and interfere with U.S. compliance with treaties forbidding deportation of noncitizens to countries where they likely would be tortured or persecuted.
Those arguments failed, at least at this stage of the case.
“We fundamentally disagree with the Supreme Court’s order allowing Texas’ harmful and unconstitutional law to go into effect,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday.
Jean-Pierre blamed congressional Republicans for blocking a bipartisan immigration bill she said was “the toughest and fairest set of border reforms in decades.”
Tuesday’s court order was unsigned, as is typical in emergency applications. Two justices in the conservative majority left the door open to reconsidering the question sooner rather than later.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said that the procedural timeline of the case suggested that the Fifth Circuit would issue a more definitive ruling quickly, and that would be the appropriate time for the Supreme Court to consider whether to temporarily suspend the law.
“If a decision does not issue soon,” she added, the Biden administration “may return to this Court.”
Liberal justices said SB 4 would wreak a revolution in immigration law and should not be allowed to take effect while courts review its constitutionality.
The majority’s decision “invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement,” Sotomayor wrote, joined by Jackson.
Writing separately, Kagan issued a brief dissent saying that “immigration generally, and the entry and removal of noncitizens particularly, are matters long thought the special province of the Federal Government,” and therefore SB 4 should be put on hold while under court review.
Write to Jess Bravin at Jess.Bravin@wsj.com and Elizabeth Findell at elizabeth.findell@wsj.com
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