We’re not even a full month into a crucial election year in the United States, and it already feels like the country is coming apart at the seams.
In a standoff that has dragged on for weeks now, Texas governor Greg Abbott, a right-wing Catholic, has refused to allow federal Border Patrol agents to enter a public park along the Rio Grande where refugees and asylum seekers are known to cross. As summarised by Camilo Montoya-Galvez, reporting for CBS: “Federal law requires Border Patrol to process migrants who enter the US illegally to determine whether they should be deported, transferred to another federal agency, sent to a long-term immigration detention centre or released pending a review of their asylum claims.”
Operating outside that chain of command, Abbott ordered the Texas National Guard to deploy razor wire as a gruesome “deterrent” to migrant crossings, and these troops have refused to allow the Biden administration to remove the razor wire. While states can have their own laws on many things in the American federal system, federal supremacy in immigration and border enforcement is a long-established precedent. Troublingly, only five of the nine justices currently occupying seats on the illegitimately stacked, right-wing partisan Supreme Court proved willing to uphold this precedent in a recent decision on Texas’s defiance.
