(Texas Scorecard) – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has announced that the state will continue to defend a border security law that was recently blocked by a federal appeals court.
Last week, a three-judge panel of the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that temporarily blocked Senate Bill 4, which became law in 2023.
The court’s 2-1 majority opinion sharply criticized SB 4’s premises.
Judge Priscilla Richman argued that the law’s provisions—deputizing law enforcement to arrest suspected illegal aliens and authorizing judges to order them to be returned to the border—directly conflicted with federal law.
“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,” Richman wrote in an opinion joined by Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez.
“Despite this fundamental axiom, S. B. 4 creates separate, distinct state criminal offenses for unauthorized entry and reentry of aliens into Texas from a foreign nation, and it provides procedures for their removal,” she continued.
One day after the ruling, Paxton revealed in a post on X that his office would “appeal this blatantly wrong decision and fight to protect the rule of law and uphold our Constitution.”
He also expressed his support for the dissenting opinion of Judge Andrew Oldham—the only judge who held that the law was legally valid.
“Texas has every right to protect public safety, and I will always fight to stop illegal immigration,” contended Paxton.
The court’s decision came one year after the U.S. District Court in Western Texas’ Austin Division granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the law from taking effect.
While the federal government under the Biden administration pursued the lawsuit, President Donald Trump had sought to drop it after taking office.
However, a coalition of pro-immigrant nonprofits and El Paso County kept the lawsuit going after their initial complaint and the Justice Department’s complaint were consolidated.
Given the typically conservative bent of the Fifth Circuit, El Paso County Attorney Christina Sanchez told Texas Public Radio that she was “very surprised” but glad that the court sided with the county.
David Donatti, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, argued that the decision “affirms the longstanding and simple rule that the United States speaks with one voice about when and how to regulate immigration.”
The future of SB 4 remains uncertain, and the case will now return to the district court for a decision on its merits.