A federal appeals court will allow the Texas immigration law permitting law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants to go into effect this week after a federal judge had previously blocked it.
Senate Bill 4 was passed and signed into law by Republican Governor Greg Abbott in December before Judge David Alan Ezra blocked it last week, ruling that states “may not exercise immigration enforcement power except as authorized by the federal government.” The appeals court’s stay on Ezra’s order, which came down over the weekend, means the law can now go into effect on March 9 unless the Supreme Court intervenes in the case and keeps it on hold, CNN reported.
SB 4 allows law enforcement officers to arrest and jail illegal immigrants and also grants state judges the power to order deportations. The law drew harsh criticism from the Biden administration, which argued that the state law interfered with federal immigration law.
The Texas law was initially scheduled to go into effect on Tuesday, March 5, but the appeals court put a hold on its ruling for seven days to allow time for the Biden administration to take the case to the Supreme Court.
Abbott responded to the appeals court decision on Monday, writing, “Law enforcement officers in Texas are now authorized to arrest & jail any illegal immigrants crossing the border.”
“Obviously this is the case unless the Supreme Court intervenes by March 9,” the governor added.
Abbott had previously vowed that his administration would fight to enforce the law all the way up to the Supreme Court. He said the law was necessary because of President Biden’s lax border policies, adding that “Texas has the constitutional authority to secure our border through historic laws like SB 4.”
Shortly after Abbott signed SB 4 into law, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Texas, arguing that the law was discriminatory and would target minorities, and a month later, the U.S. Department of Justice sued the state. The Biden administration’s and ACLU’s lawsuits have since been combined. Opponents of the law argue that it violates the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution which prohibits states from interfering with the federal government using its Constitutional powers.
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In Ezra’s ruling blocking the law from going into effect, the judge disagreed with the attorney for Texas, who argued that the law was necessary to curb the massive influx of illegal immigrants crossing from Mexico into the state, saying the crisis constitutes an invasion. Ezra said he did not see that Texas was under any sort of “military invasion.”
“I haven’t seen, and the state of Texas can’t point me to any type of military invasion in Texas,” Ezra said, according to The Texas Tribune. “I don’t see evidence that Texas is at war.”
In the first four months of fiscal year 2024, which accounts for October through January, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents recorded nearly one million migrant encounters along the U.S. southern border. That number is on top of 2.4 million border encounters in 2023, 2.3 million in 2022, and 1.7 million in 2021. It does not account for illegal immigrants who crossed the border without being detected.