The Biden administration filed suit against Abbott in early January challenging a new Texas law that allows its police to arrest and prosecute illegal border crossers. In a filing before the U.S. Supreme Court last Friday, the Department of Homeland Security accused the Texas National Guard of blocking Customs and Border Patrol workers from viewing and accessing key points along a stretch of the Texas-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, where migrants have been known to cross.
Despite Abbott’s assertion that Border Patrol would have been too late to help in any event, he has a robust history of bragging about Texas’ aggressive efforts to curtail illegal border crossings. In a Jan. 5 radio interview with Dana Loesch, spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, Abbott said Texas was “using every tool that can be used, from building a border wall to building these border barriers,” and remarked, “The only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”
Litigation about the authority to make policy at the U.S.-Mexico border is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court has considered states’ rights to make immigration laws in the past but concluded as recently as 2012 that state efforts to set immigration policy conflicts with federal authority.
Law&Crime’s Marisa Sarnoff contributed to this report.
