Texas Defies Biden Border Order
A literal Mexican stand-off.
NBC News (“Texas refuses to comply with Biden administration’s cease-and-desist letter about border access“):
Texas is refusing to comply with a cease-and-desist letter from the Biden administration over actions by the state that have impeded U.S. Border Patrol agents from accessing part of the border with Mexico.
In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton rejected the Biden administration’s request for the state to “cease and desist” its takeover of Shelby Park, an epicenter of southwest border illegal immigration in Eagle Pass.
“Because the facts and law side with Texas, the State will continue utilizing its constitutional authority to defend her territory, and I will continue defending those lawful efforts in court,” Paxton wrote.
When reached for comment, a DHS spokesperson referred NBC News to Department of Homeland Security General Counsel Jonathan Meyer’s letter this week directing the state to stop blocking the Border Patrol’s full access to roughly 2½ miles of the U.S.-Mexico border occupied by the state’s National Guard.
DHS officials said Saturday that a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande after Border Patrol agents “were physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area” under orders from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.
The Texas Military Department disputed the DHS statement, saying its personnel were aware of a distress report but had not detected any distressed migrants.
A White House spokesperson criticized Abbott’s immigration policies in response to the drownings, saying in a statement this week that his “political stunts are cruel, inhumane and dangerous.”
In Wednesday’s letter, Paxton said any suggestion the state was responsible for the deaths “is vile and, as you now should be aware, completely inaccurate.”
The Biden administration has threatened to refer the matter to the Justice Department if Texas denies Border Patrol agents full access to the area.
While this doesn’t rise quite to the level of pre-Civil War nullification doctrine, it’s pretty close. The Federal Government’s plenary authority over the border is well-established and Texas is not only in open defiance but actively preventing the Border Patrol from doing its job here. (Although, in fairness, California and other so-called Sanctuary States do the same in the opposite direction.)
The President shouldn’t be in the position of having to constantly go to the courts to exercise legal authority this well established. I suppose President Biden could take a page out of Dwight Eisenhower’s book and federalize the Texas National Guard. I suspect that he will not.
I’m not sure if the ‘opposite direction’ claim works here.. do agents of the state of California actually physically stop Border Patrol agents from acting against undocumented immigrants? That was not the impression I had, though I may just not know all the facts.
Even though this is Abbott spending billions of our tax dollars for political purposes (all the analyses and studies demonstrate the lack of effectiveness of the deployment of the Texas Guard WRT to the border), he is acting in a way that will require Biden to respond. The only way to deal with a bully like Abbott is to punch back. What should the respond be other than back and forth legal pleadings. Personally, I would federalize the Texas Guard, order them to stand down. An intermediate stage would be for Border Patrol to defy any guardsmen and dare them to respond. None are good options.
I just feel sorry for Joe Biden at this point. I mean, maybe he’s living his best life; politicians who want to become president are a different sort of person. But he should be retired somewhere, spending time with his grandkids. Instead he has to deal with two wars, a political party at home that is completely broken and unwilling to govern, and have his disfunctional family members drug through the mud(self-inflicted mud). And he seems to be doing a decent job of it.
Re: this specific instance:
I read through the initial DHS letter and Texas’ response that were linked in the articles on this on the NBC news website.
Both letters use vague language to describe the events and circumstances in question and offer differently detailed descriptions of the activities that night.
If anyone has found better (supported or substantiated?) coverage of the details, I sure would appreciate some links.
I am trying of late to read more than the headlines and summaries with quotes of some of these controversial events, especially when the topics and exchanges are so charged with emotion and political framing. Paxton’s letter seems to have more ‘detail’ in its claims, although they are probably selective in which facts to include:
On a specific note of interest to politically naive person me:
Paxton sure lays it on thick for the foundation (or support of an existing effort) of the grounds Republican extremists want to use for impeaching President Biden:
@Assad K: This is correct.
Failure to cooperate with and assist ICE agents is a different thing altogether from preventing them from entering an area that they have investigated themselves and determined to hold illegal immigrants.
“boTh SiDes aRe ThE saMe” gets a little tiring.
I’m of two minds. On one hand I’m all in favor of any efforts to hasten the dissolution of the country, which I would consider states creating their own border enforcement arm an example of. OTOH, I’m really tired of Dems and their limp responses to these sorts of provocations. Typically, the White House threatens to… go to court. How are these TMD yahoos any different from any group of Joe Q. Citizens preventing federal agents from doing their jobs? Do the feds typically walk away from a task at the slightest resistance? It just looks really weak and yet another case of Democratic administration being unwilling to use power when they have it.
Biden should just pull the border patrol from the Texas border. Problem solved. The quicker the great replacement can happen the better. The people coming into this country will keep everything we love about Texas–BBQ, football, Richard Linklater, Austin. They will just hopefully dilute the parts we hate, i.e. Texans like Ken Paxton and white megachurches.
@Tony W:..“boTh SiDes aRe ThE saMe”
There it is again. Random upper case. Annoying and hard to read. If the purpose is attention or emphasis maybe italics or bold
might work. Those fonts would be easier on my tired old eyes.
–end of rant–
I honestly don’t think that is an accurate description.
Has anyone considered the insurrection act?
Abbott is impeding federal enforcement of immigration laws, and is usurping powers reserved for the federal government.
@Mister Bluster:
That style of capitalization has been prominent on the internet for about a decade due to the “Mocking Spongebob Meme“, used when someone is saying something they believe to be very intelligent or common sense wisdom, but the audience views them to be saying nonsense. It originally was used to just directly parrot back the user’s statements in a mocking tone–very similar in tone and effect to PeeWee Herman’s “I know you are but what am I?”–but now that capitalization scheme is used more broadly to just imply that the person’s statements are mockworthy.
@Robert in SF:
Is there any reason to put credence on the Republican side of things? What you are really saying is that the Biden admnistration says one thing, and liars who lie about everything all the time say something else.
@Neil Hudelson:
I remember it as far back as the early 2000s, originally as a parody of “leetspeak” to mock people who thought they knew a lot about computers, but didn’t.
@Stormy Dragon: I maintain it’s a legitimate form of commentary.
@Assad K: @Steven L. Taylor: I don’t think they’re quite equivalent and Texas’ actions here are more destructive. But, in both instances, states are willfully flouting federal immigration laws that they don’t like.
@James Joyner:
Hmm. Aren’t all the states with legalized marijuana (medical or general) “flouting federal drug law”? Failure to cooperate is simply not in the same category as actively preventing federal agents from doing their job.
@Neil Hudelson:
@Stormy Dragon:
@Tony W:
Thank you all for the schooling regarding ancient internet memes. From now on I will greet such script with the same awe and reverence that I hold for the cave paintings in Chauvet France or the more recent Egyptian hieroglyphs.
@James Joyner:
Your position here doesn’t seem particularly small-c conservative.
@Mister Bluster:..edit to recent comment…
Not to be too far off topic…Remember the Alamo!
@MarkedMan:
Yes.
@Kurtz:
Border security is an area where the delineation of power is quite clear: it’s entirely a Federal matter. I don’t support unfunded mandates, so I’m fine with states not going out of their way to round up illegal aliens and holding them for the Feds. But it’s entirely another thing to actively refuse to collect immigration information on prisoners, for example, and then release them into the wild.
Well, he could, but Biden can’t even keep track of his Secretary of Defense. Although someone at the White House is lying about that since the NMCC at the Pentagon exchanges the location and status of National Military command officials from the President to very deep in the chain well below the SecDef with it’s counterpart watch near the Situation Room every watch change. Maybe no one told Biden/The Oval Office, but people in the White House knew the status of the SecDef.
In regards to the park in Texas, Texas withdrew its permission for federal officials to occupy and use land Texas controlled as the sovereign authority in the state (outside federal reservations and other federal land use agreements). Texas permitted access to the property for the federal government to remove all federally-owned property. Nor is there any claim that Texas is prohibiting CBP from waterborne patrols on the navigable river.
The CBP could as a federal law enforcement agency enter with proper probable clause or in exigent circumstances. Showing up for a “river rescue” without a boat is not an exigent circumstance. The federal government does not have carte blanche access to state land without state permission.
I know it hurts people’s feelings but the states are sovereign in their territory (Texas being even more as it was a sovereign nation before entering the Union).
In any case, this is just a new “media hype” over a long running Texas operation that already has court cases in the works
@James Joyner:
I haven’t heard this before. What does it mean for a state to collect immigration information on someone? Do they simply ask them? Or do they turn their names over to the Feds and ask them to investigate? My assumption is that the States wouldn’t know someone’s immigration status without going to the Feds, but I may be wrong.
Dang. I thought this was turning into an interesting thread and now it is going to get sidetracked.
@James Joyner: That is not accurate. California and the other sanctuary states/cities are not violating the law.
There was a federal mandate that States use their own internal resources to identify and detain undocumented non-citizens during things like routine traffic stops, even if they had done nothing wrong. Some cities/states objected citing their crowded jails and overworked law enforcement personnel.
The courts sided with the states and struck down the mandate as unconstitutional for two reasons – a sovereignty issue with federal taking of state resources, and a jurisdictional issue of tasking states with performing purely federal functions.
Some states voluntarily support the federal government’s request, which is fine because it is their choice. The “sanctuary” states chose otherwise. They say, “Hey feds, if you want federal functions done come here and do them yourself.”
So the accurate take is that California and the other so called “sanctuary” cities are are just distancing themselves from the immigration issue. They are not actively providing sanctuary, which is why the term “sanctuary” is so unfortunate. Uninformed people on both sides of the political spectrum assume they are.
And more to the point for this thread, they are not seditiously asserting sovereignty over purely federal functions like Texas is.
@JKB:
“Texas withdrew its permission for federal officials to occupy and use land Texas controlled as the sovereign authority in the state”
They can’t do that. Customs and Border Patrol have unrestricted rights to enforce federal customs, immigration, and border protection laws in a special jurisdiction zone within 100 miles of a national border. The Supreme Court has ruled that for these federal purposes the state boundaries and sovereignty don’t even exist.
@MarkedMan: hmmm…
I always suspected that it would turn into another guns-2nd A/Israel-Hamas venting exercise.
Am I too cynical?
ETA: I think a tell/confirmation for me was when JKB entered the “discussion.”
@JKB:
Citation for special Texas sovereignty, please.
Do you also claim this nebulous special sovereignty for Hawaii? They were also sovereign prior to annexation.
Are are you just regurgitating all the decades old, unrefrigerated red meat you have consumed for years?
Meanwhile the DOJ finds that Texas Law Enforcement is made up of dumb-ass pussies.
https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-justice-department-report-police-16b59efa5c5015d685d917c3f0f26256
But they do manage to harass people struggling to find a better life, and to prevent women from receiving need healthcare.
@JKB: “I know it hurts people’s feelings but the states are sovereign in their territory (Texas being even more as it was a sovereign nation before entering the Union).”
Looks like JKB has been studying up on all those books published before 1920 again.
@James Joyner:
Except, no. As I understand it, being a “sanctuary city” simply means the lack of acting in what would be an utterly voluntary way by local officials. Definitionally, it is not the local PDs job to enforce federal law.
That is radically different than purposefully blocking (if not usurping) a federal function.
To me, these are not equivalent. The first is kind of a pure federalism. The second is open defiance of a clear function of the national government, which is in direct violation of the core principle of federalism.
@MarkedMan: @James Joyner: The marijuana thing is quite different. It really is a conflict between what federal law says and state law says.
An equivalent here would be granting noncitizens the rights of citizens in contradistinction to federal law. That is not what is happening.
And, to my point, the feds can still choose to enforce federal law on marijuana within a state, but it is decidedly not the job of state and local law enforcement to enforce federal law (and vice versa). That is federalism in its purest form. States have laws and enforce them, likewise the feds. If they come into conflict the likelihood is that federal law wins, but even if it does, the feds enforce it, not the state.
(Texas being even more as it was a sovereign nation before entering the Union).
JKB should like this since it is 156 years old.
Maybe Governor Abbott and AG Paxton should read this too.
@James Joyner:
The bolded portions of your response, when read together, are exactly what I mean by not small-c conservative.
From a purely logical standpoint, if the respective roles are delineated so clearly that jurisdiction lies solely with the federal government, then an individual state has no role other than a negative duty of non-interference. Your example of active interference including a state official not ascertaining immigration status as active interference is a stretch at best and absurd at worst.
Put another way, if the USFG has sole jurisdiction over border enforcement, the only conservative approach would be the state having no positive duty whatsoever, absent a negotiated agreement between a state and the USFG. Creating an implied positive duty of the States (regardless of funding) to cooperate (on the federal government’s terms) is in no way conservative.
On unfunded mandates: my initial reaction to this paragraph was curiosity. I hadn’t really thought too much about them, nor the history of controversy surrounding them. At most, I had a vague recollection that it was a topic in the 90s.
But I had another thought–that objection to unfunded federal mandates strikes me as a compromise position. Specifically, that a strict adherent to federalism would be less concerned with whether the federal government funds a mandate than they would be with whether the federal government has the right to mandate something in the first place.
My understanding of politics surrounding The New Deal and then the resistance to school integration and the 60s civil rights movement led me to think that the original position taken by conservatives was about Constitutional fidelity, not logistical issues.
In lieu of doing an exhaustive search of newspaper op-ed archives or finding a book, I chose to do a quick Google search. Indeed, it didn’t take find a chapter from the Cato Handbook for Congress: Policy Recommendations for the 104th Congress.
The chapter is included under the section for “Fiscal Policy” and initially makes the case for immediate Congressional action to ban future unfunded mandates as well as the repeal of several specific policies that are not adequately funded. But the conclusion argues:
I’m open to correction, but from what I can tell, the issue of unfunded mandates did not become part of the broader political discussion until 70s, 80s, and 90s. I’m sure it was around before then, but it certainly wasn’t part of the national political consciousness until then.
This made me wince.
I wonder how people who want to apply expired or superseded past standards or practices decide at which point in time to stop.
Take Texas. it was nominally an independent, sovereign country for a very short time. Before then, it was a Mexican province or territory, before then a Spanish colony, before then home to several peoples, and before then empty of humans (and likely at some point under water as well).
Keep going back to the natural stopping point, and everything was part of the primordial atom. And it’s a stopping point because we can’t determine anything about the universe until after a very short time after it began to expand (if it began then).
@Mimai:
Reasonably so.
@Neil Hudelson:
Thanks! A good reminder to watch PeeWee’s Big Adventure again soon.
@Kathy: I think that applications of expired and superseded past standards are usually one offs in the minds of the advocates. There is no point in time in which to stop. The application is for this one thing, not as a general principle.
@Kathy:
I have a similar problem with the term “indigenous” as applied to people/groups. Like, at what point does a group become “indigenous” to a place? Is the group we call “Mexican” indigenous to the place we call “Mexico”. I think a very strong case can be made that the group we call “English” aren’t indigenous to the place we call “Britain”.
Also, migration is a pretty fundamental aspect of humanity. It’s not like we are going to all suddenly decide to pack ourselves back into Africa.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Well, otherwise, “that was a long time ago!”, right? 🙂
@Beth:
A great many human traits originated in ancestor species to H. sapiens. H. habilis and H. erectus both migrated out of Africa to Asia and elsewhere. We’re mere copycats (n pun intended).
But where did all the life on Africa originate? We don’t know. we don’t know whether life arose in one part of Earth or all over, not even if it happened only once.
It does make a difference if a group has been living on some land for generations, though.
@Kathy:
Absolutely.
And at the same time, I don’t think it can be static. Borders aren’t laid down, irrevocably, from on high.
@Beth:
I think the problem here is the “we.” There are a lot of distinctions that we don’t see, but which make every difference inside Mexico (and other countries). Our media just presents Mexicans as a monolithic group of people, living in Mexico and often just gives us Mexicans all the way down to the Cape Horn.
I have a friend who helps take asylum applications, largely from Venezuela these days, and he often tells me horrible stories that frequently hinge on the Spanish/Indigenous divisions. Good fun, and the worst stories are the best asylum applications.
I think “indigenous” is more useful as an opposite to “colonizer” than in attempting to lay perpetual claim to land. As long as the social structures imposed by the colonizers are prevalent, the previous people are indigenous, even if they had taken over the land a hundred years before the more recent colonizers arrived.
But Central and South America is easy mode.
This becomes very complicated when discussing Israel-Palestine, however, as both the Palestinians and the Jews have ties to the region, but the massive waves of Jewish immigration after WW2, and then again after the breakup of the Soviet Union, have displaced a lot of Palestinians. It looks a lot like colonization, but it would be a very weird colonization.
Some people try to make this more explicit, and claim that Ashkenazi Jews are mostly descended from southern European stock (Khazars pop up a lot*), but the genetics are pretty clear — it’s Levantine stock, mixed with Southern Europe and everywhere they’ve travelled, but primarily Levantine.
(I would think the thousand years or so they’ve been in Europe would have more relevance to their claim of territory in Israel rather than the genetics)
I’m not sold on the colonizer/indigenous interpretation of Israel-Palestine, because it tries to reduce a complex situation into a simplified version, and it ends up getting into inflammatory areas, and it doesn’t seem to help. It’s not a useful abstraction. It doesn’t lead to any solution.
——
*: I really loved Milorad Pavic’s novel Dictionary of the Khazars when I was younger, and it makes me a little sad that Khazars are mostly referenced in antisemitic theories these days, with about as much validity as phrenology. It also makes me nervous to reread the novel, as perhaps I just missed rampant antisemitism in it.
Here is the link to the information that I posted at 14:30.
@James Joyner: “But, in both instances, states are willfully flouting federal immigration laws that they don’t like.”
One is lawfully refusing to enforce federal laws, the other is illegally blocking federal officers from enforcing federal law.
Big difference.
@Beth:
I forget which emperor relinquished portions of the Roman empire in the Persian Gulf, because they couldn’t be defended. This raised a major outcry back west, because borders were seen as even beyond the ability of Jupiter to alter*.
The irony is too much, seeing how Rome altered borders all the time through conquest. It’s very likely double standards also go back to our hominid ancestors.
*The Romans had a god of borders, Terminus. The bit about Jupiter comes from an altar to Terminus that wasn’t moved when a temple to Jupiter was built, so it incorporated the altar.