The Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favour of the Biden administration’s request to remove razor wire from the US-Mexico border. This decision represents a rare victory for the Democratic president over the conservative court, which voted 6-3. The ruling made it possible for President Joe Biden’s administration to overturn a Fifth Circuit injunction from October that forbade federal agents from receiving orders to cut down fences put up in Texas to deter illegal immigration.
The Biden administration has repeatedly cut the wire that Texas had installed to prevent illegal crossings, opening the floodgates to illegal immigrants. The lack of razor wire and other deterrent strategies encourages migrants to make unsafe and illegal crossings between ports of entry, making the jobs of Texas National Guard soldiers and DPS troopers more dangerous and difficult. The case is ongoing, and Governor Abbott will fight to protect Texas’ property and constitutional authority to secure the border.
Last autumn, U.S. District Judge Alia Moses granted the injunction in response to a lawsuit filed in the Western District of Texas. The state government has frequently placed physical barriers for migrants along the border, which he and his supporters have claimed is necessary given the recent surge in migrants. Opponents have argued that some of the barricades are too dangerous. They also have circular saws embedded between spherical buoys arranged in a line along the Rio Grande River, which Texas Democratic Representative Sylvia Garcia has previously described as “cruel and inhumane.”
At the time of the ruling, Abbott shared a letter from November 2022 to Biden about the situation at the US-Mexico border, which made similar claims to his X post. He stated that the president’s policies were having catastrophic consequences and that Texas had no choice but to “escalate our efforts to secure the state.”
Individuals and entities named in the original lawsuit included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), CBP’s acting commissioner Troy Miller, U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), USBP Chief Jason Owens, and USBP Del Rio Sector acting chief patrol agent Juan Bernal.
