Texas and the Fifth Circuit

Perhaps because of all of the other news, this story hasn’t received the attention it deserves. But on Saturday night, the Fifth Circuit issued a massively important (albeit unexplained) ruling that effectively forces the Supreme Court to decide, by the end of this week, whether or not to allow Texas’s “SB4”—the most aggressive effort by a state to set up its own deportation regime that we’ve ever seen—to go into effect.

I’ve written before about SB4, a deeply controversial law adopted by Texas last year that effectively creates a state-level deportation process and provides an array of state-law authorities to make that process effective. The law is a direct (and deliberate) assault on the Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States, in which a 5-3 Court (with Justice Kagan recused) had rejected a less-aggressive attempt by Arizona to supplant federal immigration enforcement, holding that federal law, among other things, leaves the question of how to enforce immigration policy to the federal government.

  Steve Vladeck

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...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.