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There is a happening currently happening along the Texas/Mexico border which seems to be escalating in an interesting way.
The state of Texas has been taking measures to secure their border with Mexico. These measures include installing concertina wire (colloquially known as "razor wire") along the border.
A supreme court ruling said that US Border Patrol (the feds) are allowed to go into Texas against Texas's wishes and cut this wire. As /u/slowboy points out below, it is a bit more nuanced than that. There was an injunction preventing CBP from going to cut the wires, and the Supreme Court overruled it. Interesting culture war fodder: Amy Coney Barrett sided with the majority on this.
Yesterday, Greg Abbot signaled that he did not have any intention of complying with this.
Today, President Biden said that Texas has until tomorrow (Friday) to let them in. (Sorry for the low quality link here. If somebody has a better one please share it).
This does seem to be escalating rapidly. I don't see where the offramps are other than Abbot backing down. If he doesn't, what does that mean? Texas National Guard vs the Federal Government sounds awfully close to...I hate saying this, but a civil war? That's not right though since I can't imagine them shooting at each other.
This is also confusing to me politically. The border situation is not a political win for Biden. Even among liberals the cracks are starting to show. Morning Joe (msnbc show) this morning was talking about how there is a border crisis and it's the republicans causing all this illegal immigration by not doing a "Comprehensive Immigration Policy". That's obviously absurd, but it does show that liberals are willing to agree that completely open borders are suboptimal.
Edit: Trump weighs in
This, to my stupid non-lawyer brain, seems way more like an "incitement to insurrection" than anything he said on January 6th. Interesting.
I know you described the situation correctly, but I want to emphasize this point because it was not obvious to me when I first heard about this story: Texas is not directly defying the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court did not order Texas to do anything. The Supreme Court refused to uphold an injunction against the Federal Government, i.e., they said that Texas can't order the Federal Government to stop cutting wires. It's a distinction without a difference, but a big difference.
Still, if you had presented me this story a month ago, I would have guessed Texas would have backed down already. So I'm moderately surprised this is being fought. I'm still pretty cynical about a lot of Republican politicians, but maybe there's something a little deeper going on here.
Texas is standing up because they kind of are actually defending themselves against an invasion right now. Several hospitals are basically only serving migrants and aren't being compensated. They are threatening to shut down and leave the state. Biden has no political leg to stand on, and only a thin legal leg that there are 4 strong votes on SCOTUS to kick out from under him, and 2 questionable votes.
Er, Biden has a very strong legal leg to stand on. It's not an invasion, it's illegal immigration. The current situation is different in scale to what has happened continuously for many decades but not conceptually. I understand the desire to rhetorically brand the situation an "invasion", but it's not actually what it is. October 7th is what an invasion looks like.
The federal government does in fact have the legal authority to administer immigration law. That the current one is doing so very badly does not change this.
I don't think Biden and Garland's case here is nearly as strong as people keep saying it is.
The White House's argument rests entirely on a single assumption. Namely that it is illegal for a member of a Municiple or State Police force to enforce federal laws, Ditto military police (who are ordinarily considered federal cops) attached to the National Guard unless their command has been federalized and explicitly ordered to do so by the president.
That's not something that's actually written in a statute anywhere, it is an assertion being made by White House based on the preemption doctrine. It is not clear to me that Texas making it a state crime to violate federal immigration law as a pretext to use State Law enforcement and National Guard to erect fencing and make arrests is actually prohibited by the supremacy clause. And it is not clear to me that it even violates the preemption doctrine because in theory there would have to be some discrepancy between the law as passed by congress and the law as enforced by the state in order for it to do so and federal immigration laws are still on the books.
Not really. The actual case being litigated (see briefs) is much simpler, although this is confused because both sides appear to be arguing in bad faith. The Feds want to be able to cut the wire, Texas opposes them. The instant litigation isn't about what happens to the immigrants. If Texas authorities started doing what they say they want to do (i.e. summarily returning border-crossers who are mostly not Mexican to Mexico) then there would be a whole extra layer of litigation.
The Feds' position is that black-letter law gives the Border Patrol the right to enter private property within 25 miles of the border in the course of their official duties, and that cutting the wire is necessary to do so expeditiously. Texas's position is that they have a property right in their barbed wire. Given the facts (critically, that Abbott has made no secret of the fact that he wants to exclude the Border Patrol from Shelby Park) this is an easy win on the law for the Feds.
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