Texas – Once again, a federal appeals court has stopped the enforcement of a Texas immigration law that many people think is illegal because it goes too far into federal territory. This is the same thing that the U.S. government and immigrant rights groups say.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled late Thursday night that Senate Bill 4 (SB 4), which Texas lawmakers enacted in 2023, cannot move forward. The vote was 2-1. The court made it clear that only the federal government is in charge of enforcing immigration laws, not individual states.
Under the statute, Texas police may have arrested those they thought were unlawfully crossing the southern border into the United States. People who are arrested could face state charges and, in some situations, receive orders to leave the country by the state. But the panel said that this form of enforcement goes against more than a century of precedent.
“For nearly 150 years, the Supreme Court has recognized that the power to control immigration, the entry, admission, and removal of aliens, is exclusively a federal power,” the court wrote in its opinion, as reported by The Texas Tribune.
After the Texas Legislature passed SB 4 last year, the Biden administration swiftly launched a lawsuit. They said the law would disrupt the country’s immigration system and go against the Constitution. Local authorities and immigrant rights groups have joined the fight in court, saying that the bill will make it easier for police to racially profile people and make people in border communities concerned.
At first, a U.S. District Court sided with the government and put the statute on hold before it could go into force. Texas then asked the Fifth Circuit to look at the matter again.
The state tried to defend SB 4, but the verdict on Thursday stops it from going into effect for now. The court said that letting each state handle immigration crimes on its own would make the immigration enforcement system in the US less effective, which is what federal law tries to avoid.
As it was drafted, the measure would have made it a crime to enter Texas without permission, with first-time offenders facing up to six months in jail. People who break the law more than once could be charged with a felony and face up to 20 years in prison. It further said that judges might order deportation after sentencing or drop the charges if the accused decided to go back to Mexico on their own.
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The dispute is probably not over yet, and the state is likely to keep fighting for the statute in higher courts. But for now, the Fifth Circuit’s decision sends a clear message: immigration policy is still a federal subject, and states can’t try to change that.
