Good.
A federal judge in Austin on Thursday halted a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally.
The law, Senate Bill 4, was scheduled to take effect Tuesday. U.S. District Judge David Ezra issued a preliminary injunction that will keep it from being enforced while a court battle continues playing out. Texas is being sued by the federal government and several immigration advocacy organizations. Texas appealed the ruling to the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Ezra said in his order Thursday that the federal government “will suffer grave irreparable harm” if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws, creating an inconsistent patchwork of rules about immigration, which has historically been upheld as being solely within the jurisdiction of the federal government.
“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.
Ezra also wrote that if the state arrested and deported migrants who may be eligible for political asylum, that would violate the Constitution and also be “in violation of U.S. treaty obligations.”
“Finally, the Court does not doubt the risk that cartels and drug trafficking pose to many people in Texas,” Ezra wrote in his ruling. “But as explained, Texas can and does already criminalize those activities. Nothing in this Order stops those enforcement efforts. No matter how emphatic Texas’s criticism of the Federal Governments handling of immigration on the border may be to some, disagreement with the federal government’s immigration policy does not justify a violation of the Supremacy Clause.”
See here, here, and here for the background. I don’t think this ruling will come as a surprise to anyone, it’s completely consistent with existing precedent. Of course the goal for Greg Abbott and the radicals he represents is to overturn that precedent on the whims of the current SCOTUS, and that may well pan out for them. In the meantime, they’ll go scurrying to the Fifth Circuit for its usual concierge service. Don’t expect this law to be on hold for too long once they get a crack at it. I would love to be wrong about that. The Chron and the Current have more.
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