The Supreme Court won’t block Texas’ aggressive immigration law anytime soon

The Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily sided with Texas in its increasingly bitter battle with the Biden administration over immigration policy, putting into effect a sweeping state law that makes it a crime for migrants to enter Texas without permission.

As is usual when the court deals with urgent requests, the order was not motivated. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, filed a concurring opinion that appeared to reflect the majority’s premise.

They sent the case back to an appeals court for a quick ruling on whether the law can take effect while an appeal is pending, Judge Barrett wrote. “If a decision is not made soon,” she wrote, “the petitioners may return to this court.”

The court’s three liberal members — Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — dissented.

“Today the court invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement,” Judge Sotomayor wrote. “Texas passed a law directly regulating the entry and removal of non-citizens and explicitly directing state courts to ignore pending federal immigration proceedings. That law undermines the federal-state balance of power that has existed for more than a century, in which the national government has exclusive authority over the entry and removal of non-citizens.”

The court’s order addressed only one aspect of the clashes between the White House and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, who has launched a multibillion-dollar campaign to deter migrants, including by erecting razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande and a barrier of buoys in the river.

The surge in the number of migrants entering the United States has intensified a fraught battle over immigration policy, underscoring deep divisions between and sometimes within political parties. It led to House Republicans’ impeachment of the secretary of Homeland Security and the failure of a bipartisan deal in the Senate to increase border security.

The Texas law, known as SB 4, gives state courts the authority to order the deportation of migrants who enter the state without authorization and gives local law enforcement agencies the authority to arrest those who unlawfully cross the southern border. The administration, civil rights groups and El Paso County have challenged the law, saying it would hamper the federal government’s power to set immigration policy and manage foreign affairs.

In 2012, indoors Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court approved broad federal power in those areas by a vote of five to three.

“Arizona may have understandable frustrations with the problems caused by illegal immigration” as the federal government tries to address them, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, “but the state may not pursue policies that undermine federal law.”

The court’s composition has changed since then, and officials in Texas are hopeful that the current justices will change the balance of power between the federal government and the states on immigration.

In a file at the Supreme CourtTexas said its law differed significantly from Arizona’s. But if the justices disagreed, the filing said, “Arizona must be overruled because it violates both statutory and constitutional text, structure, and history.”

Judge David A. Ezrain federal district court in Austin last month has taken an interim measure blocking the Texas law, saying the plaintiffs would likely win for several reasons. “Over a century of Supreme Court cases,” he added, recognized that the Constitution gave the federal government the dominant role in addressing immigration.

Judge Ezra, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, rejected Texas’ argument that its law was authorized by a clause in the Constitution that prohibits states from making war “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as to require delay is not possible.”

He gave three reasons. According to him, unauthorized immigration is not an invasion. Enforcing state law does not constitute war. And even if both of those things were true, Texas “would have to adhere to federal guidelines.”

Texas asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to block Judge Ezra’s ruling and allow the law to take effect while the appeal is heard. A divided panel of three appeals court judges did so almost immediately, without stating reasons. The appeal will be heard on April 3.

The panel gave the plaintiffs a week to seek relief from the Supreme Court. After the plaintiffs filed an emergency motion, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., who oversees the Fifth Circuit, extended the appeals court’s brief stay so the justices could consider the case.

In the emergency request from the administrationAttorney General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote that the Texas law amounted to “interference with the nation’s ability to speak with one voice in international affairs” and would “significantly harm the United States’ relationship with Mexico.”

She added that the law would “fundamentally disrupt the federal immigration regime, allowing a single state to make unilateral decisions about unlawful entry and removal.”

In answerTexas said it “has the sovereign right to defend itself against violent transnational cartels flooding the state with fentanyl, guns and all forms of brutality.”

In January, another emergency request from the Biden administration was heard by the Supreme Court authorized federal officials to cut or remove portions of a barbed wire fence along the Mexican border that Texas had erected to prevent migrants from entering the state.

But that ruling, by a vote of 5 to 4, was only an interim victory for the government.