McALLEN, Texas (AP) — Texas will have to move a floating barrier over the Rio Grande, prompting a backlash from Mexico, a federal appeals court ruled Friday, dealing a blow to one of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s competing moves to keep immigrants out of the U. S. illegally.
The ruling by the U. S. Fifth Court of Appeals requires Texas to block all construction on the barrier to about 1,000 feet (300 meters) and move it to the riverfront. The order aligns with a lower court ruling in September that Abbott called “wrong. “” and predicted that it would be overturned.
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Instead, the New Orleans-based court handed Texas its second legal defeat this week over its border operations. On Wednesday, a federal judge allowed U.S. Border Patrol agents to continue cutting razor wire the state installed along the riverbank, despite the protests of Texas officials.
For months, Texas has asserted that parts of the Rio Grande are not subject to federal laws protecting navigable waters. But the judges said the lower court correctly sided with the Biden administration.
“The risk to navigation and federal government operations in the Rio Grande, as well as the potential risk to human life created through the Barrier Reef,” Judge Dana Douglas wrote in her opinion.
Abbott called the decision “clearly wrong” in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, and said the state would immediately seek a rehearing from the court.
“We will move to SCOTUS if required for Texas from Biden’s open borders,” Abbott posted.
The Biden administration sued Abbott over the linked and anchored buoys — which stretch roughly the length of three soccer fields _ after the state installed the barrier along the international border with Mexico. The buoys are between the Texas border city of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Coahuila.
Thousands of people were crossing into the U.S. illegally through the area when the barrier was installed. The lower district court ordered the state to move the barriers in September, but Texas’ appeal temporarily delayed that order from taking effect.
Biden’s administration has filed a lawsuit under the so-called Rivers and Harbors Act, a law that protects navigable waters. On Friday, the U. S. Department of Homeland Security said it welcomed the decision, adding that immigration enforcement was a federal duty and that consequences apply to those who crossed the border illegally.
Dissenting, Judge Don Willet, an appointee of former President Donald Trump and the former Texas Supreme Court justice, said the order to move the barriers would dissolve tensions that the Biden administration said were rising between the U. S. and Mexican governments.
“If the district court had given credence to America’s allegations of harm, then it would have ordered that the barrier not only be moved but removed,” Willet wrote. “Only a complete removal would remove the ‘construction and presence’ of the barrier and meet Mexico’s requirements. “requirements. “
Nearly 400,000 more people attempted to enter the United States through the segment of the southwest border that includes Eagle Pass last fiscal year.
In the lower court’s decision, U. S. District Judge David Ezra Texas’s justification for the barrier, he wrote at the time that the state had not presented “credible evidence that the buoy barrier, as installed, would have reduced particularly illegal immigration. “
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