On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) placed an indefinite hold on a controversial law in Texas allowing state authorities to arrest and deport illegal aliens.
As Breitbart reports, Justice Samuel Alito issued the order just after the 4 PM deadline passed for the Court to make a decision over the fate of Senate Bill 4. Alito’s order does not give a timeframe for when the pause is to expire, thus ordering Texas state authorities to not enforce the law.
The law in question was passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature and signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott (R-Texas) in response to the Biden Administration’s open-borders approach to immigration law. The law makes it a state crime for illegal aliens to enter the state of Texas from a foreign country, and thus gives state authorities the ability to arrest and deport illegals.
SB4 has been through numerous legal challenges, having been blocked, reimplemented, and blocked again by courts at various levels. It was first halted by U.S. District Judge David Ezra in February, claiming that the law violated the federal government’s authority to dictate immigration law. After the state of Texas filed an appeal, an appeals court overturned Ezra’s ruling and ruled that the law could go into effect on March 9th; that ruling was then superseded by the Supreme Court’s ruling indefinitely blocking the law.
The state of Texas has frequently clashed with the Biden Administration over immigration in recent months. Governor Abbott ordered state authorities to begin constructing makeshift barriers along the southern border, ranging from barbed wire to metal shipping containers to buoy barriers in the Rio Grande River. After Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sued, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas was to stop installing such barriers. But Governor Abbott openly declared that the state would defy the Court’s ruling and continue putting barriers in place anyway.
SB4 will eventually go before the Supreme Court for a final ruling on the law’s constitutionality.