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UPDATE (Sept. 8, 2023, 7:07 a.m. ET): A federal appeals court on Thursday put a hold on a judge's order requiring Texas officials to remove a floating barrier in the Rio Grande. The temporary pause will remain in place as the appeals court considers a longer stay.
A federal judge has ordered that a floating barrier placed by Texas officials in the Rio Grande to deter migrants from seeking harbor in the United States must be moved as courts consider its legality.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has ushered in a raft of anti-immigration measures under a widely criticized initiative known as Operation Lone Star. One of them — tossing a 1,000-foot blockade of buoys with razor wire into the Rio Grande — broke federal law, U.S. District Judge David Ezra ruled Wednesday. The Biden administration has sued to have the barrier removed under the Rivers and Harbors Appropriation Act of 1899, which requires states to seek federal permission for such projects.
In one footnote, Ezra dropped a truth bomb on the Abbott administration and the entire conservative movement over their obsession with erecting border barriers.
Ezra agreed that Texas needed to to seek permission first, and he ordered the barrier to be moved out of the water as the lawsuit is litigated in court.
“Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier,” Ezra wrote, referring to a tweet of Abbott’s from March. “Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.”
In one footnote, Ezra dropped a truth bomb on the Abbott administration and the entire conservative movement over their obsession with erecting border barriers. The judge wrote:
This Court is sympathetic with the aim of curtailing illegal immigration and illegal importation of drugs. However, the vast majority of illegal drugs which enter Texas, and indeed the United States in general, come through ports of entry by using covert means and not through this stretch of the Rio Grande River.
Texas officials have used extremist rhetoric to portray migrants approaching the U.S. border as part of an “invasion” to constitutionally justify taking violent, cruel and, fundamentally, unilateral actions. Ezra dispensed with that argument, writing that Texas’ “self defense argument is unconvincing” and that the state’s claim of being invaded “is a non-justiciable political question demonstrably committed to the federal political branches.”
Abbott immediately vowed to appeal, but the fiasco is the latest sign that his Operation Lone Star effort is taking on water. The Justice Department has already opened a civil rights investigation into the operation, Texas National Guard members have complained about poor working conditions and pay, multiple soldiers linked to the mission are suspected to have died by suicide, and now the buoy blockade has been beached.