Hours after the U.S. Supreme Court granted Texas authorities permission to arrest immigrants suspected of crossing the southern border of the country without authorization, an appeals court prevented the state from enforcing the controversial law known as SB4.
In an order issued late Tuesday night (19), a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved a stay it had issued earlier in March to suspend a decision from a lower court that deemed SB4 unconstitutional.
Thus, the order reinstated a decision by U.S. District Judge David Ezra, who concluded in late February that SB4 conflicted with federal immigration laws and the Constitution.
Earlier on Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied a request from the Department of Justice to overturn the initial order from the 5th Circuit that suspended Ezra’s decision. The higher court then allowed SB4 to go into effect, which lasted only a few hours.
Ezra’s decision blocking SB4 will remain in effect until the 5th Circuit decides on Texas’s request to allow the law to be enforced while the appeals court considers its legality.
Approved by the Texas legislature last year, SB4 criminalizes unauthorized immigration at the state level, making the act of entering the U.S. outside of a port of entry – already a federal crime – a state crime.
SB4 empowers law enforcement officials in Texas, at both state and local levels, to detain and prosecute immigrants based on these new criminal charges. It also grants state judges the power to require immigrants to return to Mexico as an alternative to criminal prosecution.
The Department of Justice stated that SB4 conflicts with federal law and the Constitution, noting that immigration enforcement, including arrests and deportations, has long been a federal responsibility. It also argued that the measure harms relations with the Mexican government, which has denounced SB4 as “anti-immigrant” and promised to reject immigrants returned by the state of Texas.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has positioned himself as the state’s leading critic of President Biden’s border policies, portrayed SB4 as a necessary measure to deter immigrants from crossing the Rio Grande, arguing that the federal government has not done enough to prevent illegal immigration.
In the past three years, Texas has undertaken the most aggressive state effort to challenge the federal government’s power over immigration policy, transporting tens of thousands of migrants to large cities led by Democrats, erecting barbed wire and buoys along stretches of the border to prevent immigrant crossings, and filing multiple lawsuits against federal immigration programs.
Source: CBS News