A new Texas law that empowers state officials to detain and deport migrants will remain on hold, after a divided appeals court ruling late Tuesday that said the statutes “significantly impair the exercise of discretion by federal immigration officials.”
The 2-1 decision announced by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit follows conflicting rulings over the new state law, which the Supreme Court briefly allowed to take effect last week.
The justices urged the 5th Circuit to take additional action on the law, and a three-member panel of the appeals court temporarily halted it and held a hearing on the matter.
It is that panel that issued the ruling late Tuesday.
The ruling means the state law, known as Senate Bill 4, will remain on hold while lawsuits seeking to overturn it make their way through the courts.
The same three-judge panel, based in New Orleans, has scheduled a hearing April 3 to review a lower-court ruling last month that said the law is probably unconstitutional and blocked it from taking effect. In that ruling, U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra, a Republican appointee in Austin, said the law intruded more into federal powers over immigration than an Arizona immigration law that the Supreme Court partly struck down in 2012.
Texas Republicans, led by Gov. Greg Abbott, passed the S.B. 4 law last year, after accusing President Biden of weak border enforcement. U.S. authorities have apprehended an average of 2 million migrants a year who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally since Biden took office, the highest the Border Patrol has ever recorded.
Democrats have countered that Republicans are refusing to pass a bipartisan Senate bill that would address the influx by expanding enforcement. The Biden administration has accused Republicans of stalling in response to former president Donald Trump, an immigration hard-liner who denounced the bill and is the likely Republican nominee to challenge Biden in November’s presidential election.
The Texas law makes it a crime for a noncitizen to enter the state illegally from another country. Migrants convicted of violating the law could face up to six months in jail, while those who return after having been deported could face felony charges and a maximum of 20 years in prison.
The law also authorizes state judges to order deportations to Mexico. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, however, has said his government would reject any attempt by Texas officials to send migrants to Mexico.
The Texas law was challenged in court by the Biden administration in January, and last year by a pair of Texas nonprofit groups and the county government of El Paso.
At least one other lawsuit has been filed against the state law, on behalf of a Texas community organization, La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), and four unidentified immigrants who allege they are eligible to stay in the United States legally but could be targeted for deportation under Texas’s law.
In its decision late Tuesday to continue blocking the law, the 5th Circuit appeals court noted: “For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has held that the power to control immigration — the entry, admission, and removal of noncitizens — is exclusively a federal power. Despite this fundamental axiom, [Senate Bill 4] creates separate, distinct state criminal offenses and related procedures regarding unauthorized entry of noncitizens into Texas from outside the country and their removal.” The 50-page ruling added that “the Texas entry and removal laws also significantly impair the exercise of discretion by federal immigration officials.”
The decision was written by Chief Judge Priscilla Richman, a nominee of President George W. Bush, and joined by Circuit Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, who was nominated to the federal bench by Biden.
In a 71-page dissent, Judge Andrew S. Oldham, a Trump nominee and former general counsel to Abbott, argued that the ruling “means the State is forever helpless: Texas can do nothing because Congress apparently did everything, yet federal non-enforcement means Congress’s everything is nothing.”
This is a developing story. It will be updated. William Branigin and Ann E. Marimow contributed to this report.