Just because the Supreme Court allowed the Biden administration some leeway last week, that doesn’t mean Texas will lose in the end, lawyers say.
In the brewing showdown between Texas and the Biden administration over the border crisis, the Lone Star state is embroiled in at least three lawsuits over its efforts to defend its borders.
The state has erected physical barriers and implemented its own legal regime to prosecute and deport illegal aliens.
The federal government has challenged those efforts, and with the legal battles ongoing, experts differ on whether the Lone Star’s campaign will be futile or fertile.
Mexican drug cartels, which traffic in illegal substances such as fentanyl, are driving an unprecedented human influx that has dominated news cycles and become the second biggest non-economic concern among Americans.
Texas officials can’t charge those they apprehend with violating federal immigration law, so the Texas National Guard is handing detainees over to the Texas Department of Public Safety to be charged with trespassing under state law.
The growing throngs of illegal immigrants flowing across the border have been characterized by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, as an “invasion.”
Twenty five Republican governors have united behind Texas. Some are sending their own National Guard troops to Texas to help out.
As their jurisdictions are overwhelmed by illegal aliens, some Democrats, such as New York City mayor Eric Adams, have joined Republicans in criticizing lax immigration enforcement by the Biden administration.
Three Cases
The most publicized of the three cases is Department of Homeland Security (DHS) v. Texas.
On Jan. 22, the Supreme Court vacated an appeals court order that directed the federal government to leave Texas’s razor wire intact.
The court seemed to add to the chaos at the nation’s porous southern border, voting 5–4 to let the U.S. Border Patrol cut, if needed, the concertina wire fencing that Texas erected along a stretch of the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, which borders the Mexican city of Piedras Negras.
The underlying case is still pending before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and may percolate back up to the Supreme Court.
