A group of Republican state attorneys general filed a legal brief supporting Texas Governor Greg Abbott in his battle with the Biden administration over barriers in the Rio Grande river to deter illegal immigration.
Led by Kansas AG Kris Kobach, over 20 states argued that under the Constitution states have a right to self-defense, and the federal government cannot limit that through the Rivers and Harbors Act as claimed.
“The Constitution guarantees the States’ right to self-defense expressly and as a natural incident of the States’ status as sovereign entities,” the brief reads.
They criticized Biden’s border policies for encouraging illegal immigration and the resulting crisis of crime, trafficking and deaths.
“Here, however, the federal government has sought to disable Texas’s exercise of that right by claiming that it violates a federal law focused on the navigability of the nation’s waterways, a law that does not expressly limit the States’ ability to engage in self-defense.”
“The current administration has not only failed to secure the border, but also has willfully enacted policies that have encouraged illegal immigration. The result: millions of illegal aliens crossing the southern border and continuing into the interior,” they wrote.
“A flood of illegal immigration across the Southern border that has brought with it crime, human trafficking, and hundreds of thousands of fentanyl deaths to the people of this country. In both scope and effect, the wave of illegal migrants pouring across the border is like an invasion.”
Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti argued that unrestricted migration amounts to an invasion, and if states cannot defend themselves they lose sovereignty, especially since the federal government has abdicated responsibility.
The brief says states have a right to protect themselves from invasion.
“It’s not just important because immigration is important, we obviously have a real problem with illegal immigration right now, just the scale and the volume of people coming in and the inability of our existing institutions to deal with that,” Skrmetti said. “But separately this is an important matter of state sovereignty. We have a constitutional system that has both the federal government and the state governments as sovereign governments. And if a state’s not able to defend itself then it loses a key part of that sovereignty.”
“The federal government has abdicated its responsibility,” he said. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact and the states have a right and an obligation to engage in self-defense.”
