Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is up to it again, signing an unlawful new state law to make crossing into the country illegally a state misdemeanor. We don’t expect it to last much beyond when the ink has dried.
Regular readers might recall that, for well more than a year now, we’ve been warning that Abbott’s immigration demagoguery wouldn’t stop and in fact would only intensify as long as he faced few consequences for it. New Yorkers are probably most familiar with his busing of thousands of migrants north to the city, arguably the genesis of the broader wave of arrivals that has come to dominate political life here.
The stunt was done without any real coordination or notice because, from the start, the governor didn’t care one bit about the health and safety of the real human beings on those buses, including many families with children, instead seeing them as opportune tools for his posturing.
Yet that was far from Abbott’s first border antic, and this recent move to wrest away control of immigration away from the federal government — for many reasons the only level that legally has a policymaking and regulatory role — has plenty of precedent.
His insistence on inspecting commercial vehicles coming into the state from Mexico this April — in partial duplication of the inspections already done by federal customs personnel whose job it actually is to do so — snarled trade with our largest trade partner and almost triggered an international incident. Undeterred by the fiasco, he did it again a month later.
His Operation Lone Star began in 2021 as a series of state law enforcement and National Guard deployments to the border region, largely for show but occasionally to arrest migrants on the strained reasoning of trespassing on private property. The effort quickly became a disaster, leading to the suicide deaths of several troops, but Abbott just expanded it further, eventually adding buoys and razor wire that seemed designed to maim or kill migrants, and which eventually appear to have fulfilled that purpose.
At least that time the federal government took action, suing Abbott and eventually getting an appeals court to order him to take down his floating barrier, but the man in Austin just keeps churning out his drivel.
Let’s be crystal clear that no state has any conceivable ground to stand on in attempting to criminalize entry without federal inspection. Similar state laws, including some infamously passed in Arizona more than a decade ago, were struck down.
Texas’ attempt will turn out no differently, because for a century and a half, the ability to regulate immigration has been vested exclusively in the federal government, a fact that probably wouldn’t bother Abbott much if it cut in the other direction; we imagine that if Gov. Hochul set up her own checkpoints along the Canadian border with laxer entry standards than those required by federal law, Abbott would be screaming.
Of course, Abbott knows this, and he doesn’t really care because he wins either way. Either the law stands and he gets to use more state power against helpless migrants, or it gets struck down and he gets to get rabble-rouse about how his tough-on-immigrants plans are getting foiled by liberal judges. Everyone else, of course, loses.