Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by a coalition of 15 other attorneys general, has sent a letter to the leadership of the United States Senate strongly objecting to measures in the “border bill” proposed in that chamber after negotiation with the White House.
The letter highlights the bill’s failure to solve problems contributing to high volumes of border encounters, explaining: “We implore our lawmakers to return to the basics: eliminate incentives for aliens to come to the country, eliminate policies, definitions, and loopholes that allow them to illegitimately enter and stay, and credibly fortify national deportation efforts.”
The letter disavows the use of border security funding as a bargaining chip to secure foreign aid, and opposes a measure in the bill that would give the District Court for the District of Columbia the sole jurisdiction to hear legal and constitutional challenges to the provisions of the proposal, which would drastically stack the deck against any legal challenges brought by the States against the federal government.
The letter additionally calls on Congress to authorize the States to enforce existing federal immigration laws, explaining: “This would put to rest any even potential pre-emption arguments under the Supreme Court’s Arizona v. United States decision by legislatively overriding the issue. The Biden Administration has repeatedly—and wrongly—claimed that Texas and the other States have no legal authority to enforce federal immigration law and continues to rely on that SCOTUS decision to attack Texas’s lawful border security actions,” noting that this is “a meaningful change that would cost nothing.”
Attorney General Paxton writes in the letter: “This bill prioritizes the interests of foreign nationals, corporate lobbies seeking cheap labor, non-governmental organizations paid to implement the Biden Administration’s policies, and the entire open-borders industrial complex over the interests of our taxpaying American citizens. It codifies countless policy objectives the Biden Administration and the open-borders lobby have sought for years. It empowers the same officials who have acted with total disregard for the people of this country instead of cracking down on their failures to enforce the law.”
To read the letter, click here.