February 16, 2024
Shows unenforced federal laws do not preempt state’s action
| WASHINGTON—Attorneys United for a Secure America (AUSA), a project of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), has filed a brief in a Texas federal district court defending a new Texas border law from twin lawsuits brought by ACLU-represented activists and the Biden administration. AUSA filed the brief on behalf of the organization Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC). In these consolidated cases, the administration and its activist allies are asking the court to strike down Texas’s new law before it takes effect in March, claiming that its apprehension and removal provisions are preempted by federal immigration law. AUSA shows in its brief, however, that it would be premature to block the law before it takes effect and its actual degree of conflict with federal law, if any, can be assessed. This is especially so because the law does not appear to conflict with the purposes of federal immigration law, but rather to advance those purposes. Also, the very federal regulatory scheme that supposedly preempts the Texas law has been so unenforced by Biden that it has become a dead letter. “The administration is in the terrible legal posture of claiming that the laws it refuses to enforce somehow preempt a state’s vigorous efforts to achieve Congress’s goals itself,” said Dale L. Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of IRLI. “Our system was not designed to reward executive abdication and lawbreaking in that way. We hope the court applies the actual Constitution in these cases, and leaves Texas’s law standing.” The cases are United States v. Texas, No. 1:24-cv-00008, and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center v. McGraw, No. 1:23-cv-01537 (W.D. Tex.). |
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