Greg Abbott aims for a battle at the border

Since the start of the Biden administration, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has increasingly challenged the federal government on immigration, questioning the idea, long championed by federal courts, that it is Washington, not the border states, that determine immigration. policy.

Mr. Abbott has been able to score some important victories, pushing the boundaries of what a governor can do when it comes to immigration enforcement.

With the support of the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature, he has poured more than $10 billion into a long-term deployment of state police and National Guard troops to the border, leaving parts of Texas communities along the Rio Grande converted into quasi-military encampments. complete with bases for soldiers and concertina wire borders.

“Texas is doing its part to secure a border made wide open by Joe Biden,” Abbott said at the start of a speech. press conference in December near a section of towering steel border fencing installed and paid for by the state.

Lawyers for Mr. Abbott and the state of Texas went to a federal appeals court on Wednesday for what the governor seemed to be aiming for all along: a showdown with the federal government over Texas’ power to set its own immigration policies.

The legal battle centers on the state’s most ambitious and bold challenge yet to federal supremacy over immigration: a new law signed by the governor that makes it a crime for migrants to enter Texas from abroad without authorization , punishable by imprisonment. , deportation by the state, or both.

Even before a final ruling in the case, Mr. Abbott was able to briefly celebrate a victory Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the law, known as Senate Bill 4, to take effect at least temporarily. For a few hours, the Supreme Court gave the state of Texas the power to take immigration enforcement more fully into its own hands.

But officers in Texas had not yet made any arrests under the law when later on Tuesday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an order lifting the previous stay and temporarily reinstating an injunction blocking implementation of the measure. law.

The ultimate outcome of the case remained an open question. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit would hear arguments on whether the order would be set aside during the many months it would take for Texas to appeal the ruling, or reinstate the order and enforce the law. would stand guard while the case was being heard. the appeal procedure.

But for Mr. Abbott, the focus on the border and the legal wrangling over his border enforcement program, known as Operation Lone Star, have already yielded major political gains.

His immediate challenges on immigration policy – a top issue for Texans, especially Republicans – have won him strong support within his own party and majority support in the state.

His legal battle with the Biden administration has brought Republican governors from across the country to his side, prompting 25 of them to join a statement in January that they “stick to Texel.”

Mr. Abbott beamed as he sat next to Donald J. Trump during a recent visit by the former president to the border town of Eagle Pass. He later played on Trump’s suggestion that he could be considered as a running mate.

“He’s very nice about suggesting things like that,” Mr. Abbott said this in an interviewadding that he was “deeply committed” to governing Texas and would eventually seek a fourth term.

Mr. Abbott, however, was not always viewed with affection by immigration hardliners and Trump supporters. During his 2022 re-election campaign, he faced major challenges from several Republicans, including a former senator, Don Huffines, who repeatedly challenged Mr. Abbott to take more aggressive steps at the border. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, invited Mr. Huffines Appear on his show and join the attack on the governor in 2021.

Since then, Mr. Abbott has taken a hard turn, which he insists was not motivated by political pressure but by what he says was the federal government’s failure to adequately secure the border.

He has sent thousands of National Guard members to the border.

He used a migrant bus program, initially derided by critics as a political stunt, to send more than 100,000 migrants out of state, turning Texas’ record number of arrivals into a pressing political issue for Democrats in cities like New York and Chicago. The bus program divided his political opponents and helped change the terms of the national debate on immigration.

He placed a barrier of buoys in the Rio Grande, forcing the federal government to fight him in court to remove them. He directed state police to establish a program to arrest migrants found on private farmland and charge them with criminal trespass.

And in an effort clearly intended to directly address the constitutional questions of whether a state has the right to assume the role of the federal government in immigration matters, Mr. Abbott advanced a legal theory of an “invasion” of migrants, put forward by Mr. Huffines and some former Trump administration officials. The governor formally declared the arrival of record numbers of migrants an invasion invokes part of the US Constitution which, according to his argument, allows states to take over war powers in such situations.

Mr Abbott has since reiterated his declaration of an invasion. Texas lawyers cited the legal theory of invasion as one of their arguments in defense of the migrant arrest law.

In issuing an injunction against the law last month, a federal district judge in Austin said the invasion argument failed on several counts, rejecting the idea that Texas was somehow at war. The Texas law violated federal statutes and was unconstitutional, the court ruled, citing decades of federal rulings and Supreme Court precedents.

But it was clear that in light of the new 6-3 Conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Mr. Abbott fully intended to challenge these precedents, especially a 2012 decision. Arizona v. United States, in which the Supreme Court, by a 5-3 vote, reaffirmed the federal government’s broad power over immigration.

This bold legal move may ultimately fail in court. But for the governor, it has already been a winning strategy.