Texas Just Made Itself Its Own Border Patrol

Maria Salinas
Apr 27
3 min read

For more than 150 years, immigration enforcement in the United States operated under a straightforward legal principle: it belongs to the federal government. States assist. States cooperate. That legal architecture changed Friday when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling 10 to 7, lifted the preliminary injunction that had kept Texas Senate Bill 4 from taking effect, finding that the plaintiffs who challenged the law lacked standing to sue.

Judges explicitly declined to weigh in on the underlying legal questions. The injunction was lifted on procedural grounds alone, leaving the most pressing constitutional question of whether a state has the authority to create its own immigration crimes entirely unanswered. The law is now enforceable.

SB 4, signed into law in December 2023 by Governor Greg Abbott, establishes state-level penalties for individuals accused of crossing into Texas unlawfully from another country and authorizes state judges to issue removal orders. A first-time illegal entry offense carries up to six months in jail. Illegal reentry — applicable to anyone previously deported or removed — escalates to a felony carrying between two and twenty years in prison, depending on prior criminal history. A county patrol officer who stops someone for a broken taillight in Laredo now has the statutory authority to demand immigration status, execute an arrest on state charges, and refer the case to a Texas state judge empowered to issue what functions as a deportation order. No ICE. No federal immigration court.

Before Friday, two separate courts had blocked the law, citing the longstanding legal principle that states are limited to assisting the federal government in enforcing immigration law and cannot construct parallel state-level immigration regimes. The federal government originally sued to stop SB 4 before it took effect, but withdrew that challenge in March 2025 after the Trump administration took office. What remained was a lawsuit brought by advocacy organizations and El Paso County. The full Fifth Circuit ruled that none of them held the legal authority to bring it.

The ruling arrived at the close of a week already devastating for Democratic-led Texas cities. Around $200 million in public safety funding was placed at risk for Houston, Dallas, and Austin, each of which maintained policies directing officers against prolonging detentions during traffic stops in order to contact ICE. Houston faced the steepest exposure, with Abbott's office threatening to withdraw approximately $110 million in public safety grants. Dallas stood to forfeit more than $32 million in grants along with more than $55 million in World Cup public safety funding.

Each city conceded. The Dallas Police Department updated its general orders to confirm that officers are permitted to ask detained individuals about their immigration status and relay that information to ICE, stripping out provisions that had previously prohibited prolonging detentions for immigration purposes. Houston's City Council revised its ordinance mid-week. Austin announced updates to Austin Police Department general orders clarifying officer obligations toward ICE, becoming the third city to revise its policy within the same week.

The law's enforcement mechanism carries no requirement that an officer witness an actual border crossing. Any non-citizen found anywhere in Texas, including those with lawful status, is subject to questioning, detention, and arrest under probable cause determinations made entirely at the officer's discretion. Victims of violent crimes must now calculate whether contacting law enforcement exposes them to immigration consequences, a calculation that erodes public safety in communities where legal precarity is already a daily reality.

@Santitos

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