Texas can now proceed toward enforcing Senate Bill 4 after the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted a temporary injunction that had stopped the state for years, according to the court order released Friday.
The ruling came in a case brought by Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, American Gateways and El Paso County. The Fifth Circuit vacated the injunction after determining that the plaintiffs did not have standing to pursue the lawsuit, without reaching the merits of the constitutional questions raised by opponents of the law.
In the 10-7 decision, the court said the plaintiffs failed to meet the standing requirements under recent Supreme Court precedent. The order said the organizations had “voluntarily incurred costs to advocate for clients,” and that this was “falls far short of conferring standing,” according to the court’s language.
The court’s action lifted the lower-court order that had blocked enforcement of the 2023 law. The Fifth Circuit emphasized that it was not deciding whether Senate Bill 4 is lawful, noting that the case was resolved on procedural grounds instead of by addressing the underlying legal arguments.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the outcome on social media. Paxton said Texas’s right to arrest “illegals,” protect “our citizens,” and enforce immigration law is “fundamental,” calling the appellate decision “a major win for public safety and law and order,” according to the AP report.
Senate Bill 4, passed in 2023, creates a state misdemeanor for illegally crossing the border into Texas and authorizes authorities to arrest people suspected of violating it, the report said. The law also requires state magistrate judges to order people arrested for illegal entry to leave the country for Mexico in lieu of prosecution or if they are convicted.
The Biden administration had challenged the law as unconstitutional, but the AP report said the Trump administration dropped the Department of Justice’s participation in the case. In Texas’s defense, state officials argued that the state has a right to respond to what GOP leaders described as an invasion—an argument that courts in recent decades have largely rejected, according to the reporting.
The Fifth Circuit’s majority decision did not address that invasion framing, the report said. In a concurring opinion, Judge James Ho argued that Texas had a right to defend itself, citing a book that posits Mexico and other countries have weaponized migrants against the United States, and wrote that elected officials can respond in political debates rather than through judges, according to the AP account.
The report said it was not immediately clear whether Senate Bill 4 would go into effect right away. Nicolas Palazzo, director of legal services at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center, said the appeals court “took the easy way out” by declining to rule on the merits, and said that avoiding the core question left the law “wide open” to continue affecting migrants and their families, according to a statement provided to the AP via the Texas Tribune partnership.