It means the Texas immigration law to go into effect as the appeals process plays out.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed Texas to enforce a law that would allow local law enforcement officials to arrest people suspected of being illegal immigrants.
After the high court temporarily blocked enforcement of the law, the Supreme Court issued a decision to reject an emergency request that was made by the Biden Department of Justice, which argued that states have no right to enforce immigration law and that it violated the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
The Supreme Court’s order provided no reasons, but Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh filed concurring opinions. Three Democrat-appointed justices, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.
With the ruling, the immigration law can now go into effect while lower courts consider the law, known as SB4. It was passed by the Republican-controlled state Legislature last year and signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in late December.
Specifically, SB4 allows local and state police to arrest people who have illegally crossed the U.S.–Mexico border and imposes criminal penalties. State judges are also given the power to order illegal immigrants to be deported under the measure.
In her concurring opinion, Justice Barrett wrote that the high court has “never reviewed the decision of a court of appeals to enter—or not enter—an administrative stay.”
“When entered, an administrative stay is supposed to be a short-lived prelude to the main event: a ruling on the motion for a stay pending appeal. I think it unwise to invite emergency litigation in this Court about whether a court of appeals abused its discretion at this preliminary step,” she wrote.
The three dissenting justices, however, decried the law and said it would upend the federal government’s authority. “The Court gives a green light to a law that will upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos, when the only court to consider the law concluded that it is likely unconstitutional,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justice Jackson.
Reacting to the Supreme Court’s decision, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote on social media Tuesday that his state notched a “huge win” and that the law “is now in effect.”
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