What’s wrong with keeping ourselves safe from criminals? On Wednesday, January 3rd., Law and Crime published this headline, “Biden administration asks SCOTUS to allow feds to cut through razor wire along Texas-Mexico border.”
One of the many immigration-related battles between President Joe Biden’s administration and the state of Texas reached the Supreme Court Tuesday when the federal government asked the justices to step in and allow it to cut razor wire barriers along 29 miles of the Rio Grande.
U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed an emergency appeal on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) asking that the court overturn an order issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued on Dec. 19, 2023.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) initiated a wide-scale anti-immigration campaign dubbed “Operation Lone Star” in 2021. Abbott’s efforts to increase border security included installation of concertina wire — a type of coiled razor wire — along with a floating barrier of buoys in the Rio Grande and a plan to add thousands of Texas state troopers to patrol parts of the state’s 1,254 mile long border with Mexico. Opponents say the harsh measures will result in racial profiling and will threaten community safety by disincentivizing crime victims to speak with law enforcement.
Texas filed a civil lawsuit in federal court claiming that CPB agents were cutting, destroying, and damaging fencing that Texas had strategically placed along the U.S.-Mexico border on private land, with landowners’ permission. The New Orleans-based 5th Circuit ruled in favor of Texas and issued an injunction against CPB, ordering the government to cease removing the razor wire except in cases of emergency, such as if a migrant is “drowning or suffering heat exhaustion.”
Central to the dispute between Texas and the federal agencies involved in the case is the scope of the federal government’s control over immigration policy. The Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that the federal power to regulate immigration is “broad” and that individual states have “no such powers,” and disputes about state power to regulate borders with a foreign country have been relatively rare.
Thomas Robb, the National Director of the Knights Party of the Ku Klux Klan, centrally based in Harrison, Arkansas spoke from his office saying, “You have to ask yourself, why would our government have a problem with anyone trying to secure our boarder. Razor wire is used by jails and prisons to contain unlawful and sometimes dangerous criminals, so what is wrong with using it to keep unlawful and dangerous criminals out of our country? These people invading America aren’t coming here to build America, they’re coming here to destroy America. Americans that think these people are fleeing here to get away from a tyrannical goverment and dangers in their homelands are sadly mistaken. Look at the news! Every place these people are re-located to is being destroyed. They cry out, ‘more..more..more’, when there is no more to give. Then they turn to criminal acts to get what they want. Take a good hard look at America right now. These invaders are coming to a more dangerous place than what their homelands are. I’ve preached for years that this day was coming, and here we are. What we are witnessing in America is an accelerated mass genocide of White people from our homeland. The time for White American citizens to stand up and say ‘enough’ is upon us.”