The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked a Texas immigration law on an emergency request from the Biden administration amid its fierce battle with the state over how to police the southern border.
The law, Senate Bill 4, allows Texas law enforcement officers to detain and deport undocumented immigrants who cross the border. It will be put on ice until at least March 13 as the high court weighs the case and decides how to proceed, according to an order penned by Justice Samuel Alito. (Alito, a conservative, oversees the federal circuit handling the case, according to CNN.)
The order flips a federal appeals court’s decision that would have allowed the law to go into effect as soon as Sunday morning, provided the Supreme Court didn’t intervene. The three-judge panel’s ruling was itself a reversal of a lower court’s order to block the law, with a federal judge in Austin writing that its implementation “could open the door to each state passing its own version of immigration laws.”
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In its emergency request, the Justice Department argued that the law would “create chaos” at the border and was “flatly inconsistent” with precedent set by the Supreme Court over the last century.
The high court’s decisions have historically recognized “that the authority to admit and remove noncitizens is a core responsibility of the national government, and that where Congress has enacted a law addressing those issues, state law is preempted,” the department said in its appeal.
When governor Greg Abbott signed SB 4 into law in December, proponents hailed it as a safeguard against a growing population of migrants arriving every day at the southern border.
But opponents objected that it was a glaring overreach of state power: The authority to regulate immigration has historically been the domain of the federal government alone. In a statement, the ACLU called SB 4 “one of the most extreme anti-immigrant laws ever passed by any state legislature in the country” and said it would directly endanger Black and brown Texans through racial profiling.
The Biden administration has repeatedly clashed with Abbott’s government through its handling of the border. In January, it claimed that Texas state officers at a local park physically prevented federal border patrol agents from rescuing migrants who were drowning in the Rio Grande—a standoff that federal agents said may have resulted in the deaths of three people, including two children. State authorities disputed that claim, saying the three people had drowned before border patrol agents arrived.
