The Supreme Court is allowing US Border Patrol agents to remove razor wire deployed by Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott’s security initiative at the US-Mexico border while the state’s legal challenge to the practice plays out.
The vote was 5-4.
The justices’ order is a major victory for President Joe Biden in his ongoing dispute with Abbott over border policy, which had become especially fraught in recent days after three migrants drowned in a section of the Rio Grande that state officials have blocked agents’ access to, prompting the administration to further press for the high court’s intervention.
A federal appeals court last month ordered the Border Patrol agents to stop removing razor wire along a small stretch of the Rio Grande while court proceedings continue, and the Justice Department asked the justices earlier this month to step in on an emergency basis to wipe away that order, which they did on Monday.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh said they would have denied the federal request.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The justices’ order is a major victory for President Joe Biden in his ongoing dispute with Abbott over border policy, which had become especially fraught in recent days after three migrants drowned in a section of the Rio Grande that state officials have blocked agents’ access to, prompting the administration to further press for the high court’s intervention.
Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said that while the order is a victory for the Biden administration, the delay in issuing it raises future questions.
“The result of Texas’s position would be that States across the country could invoke their laws to impede the federal government’s exercise of its authority,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in court papers.
“If that injunction is left in place,” Prelogar stressed, “it will impede Border Patrol agents from carrying out their responsibilities to enforce the immigration laws and guard against the risk of injury and death, matters for which the federal government, not Texas, is held politically accountable.”
In subsequent filings to the high court, Prelogar said that new barriers recently erected by Texas – including new fencing, gates and military Humvees – “demonstrate an escalation” of the state’s efforts to hamstring the government’s border patrol duties and “reinforce” a need for swift intervention in the matter.
She also told the court that Texas was violating a critical part of the injunction that allows federal agents to cut wire to address medical emergencies, arguing that the drownings of two children and a woman earlier this month, as well as the rescue by Mexican officials of two other migrants on the US side of the Rio Grande, “underscore that Texas is firm in its continued efforts … to block Border Patrol’s access to the border even in emergency circumstances.”
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