The DOJ is suing Texas - and Rep. Williams just SHREDDED the Justice Department’s lawsuit in a letter to the AG

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Earlier in January, Republican Rep. Roger Williams (TX) sent a letter to the Biden Administration’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, expressing his and other fellow congressmembers’ disapproval of the Justice Department’s lawsuit aimed at Texas in response to the state attempting to address the border crisis.

While the recent Supreme Court decision pertaining to the strife between the federal government and Texas over attempts to secure the border have accrued due attention, the Justice Department has been embroiled in a separate legal battle against Texas over legislation passed back in December of 2023.

On December 18, 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law SB4, which essentially mimicked federal immigration law in the realm of entry without inspection but on a state level. Per the signed legislation aimed directly at illegal immigrants, the act specifically prohibited “illegal entry into or illegal presence in [Texas] by a person who is an alien,” thus opening the door for state and local law enforcement to arrest those who’ve illegally crossed into the United States along the Texas border.

In a matter of weeks following the Texas bill being signed, the Biden Justice Department announced the filing of a lawsuit in response to SB4 on January 3, 2024.

According to the press release from the Justice Department at the time, the federal government cited the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution as being the fodder for the lawsuit, in tandem with standing Supreme Court precedent which has asserted matters related to border security and immigration is a task solely handled by the federal government.

But the issue Texas officials have been claiming for some time, largely since Biden took office due to the overwhelming number of illegal crossings along the southern border during said time period, is that the federal government simply isn’t doing their job in securing the southern border.

Ergo, Texas officials feel confident that they have legal authority to protect their portion of the U.S./Mexico border in tandem with enforcing immigration laws since the sentiment is the federal government isn’t doing what their tasked with.

Enter U.S. House Rep. Williams, representing Texas’ 25th District, who made quite the move in response to the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Texas on January 3, 2024, introducing legislation that would give Texas the authority to secure their portion of the southern border, uninhibited.  

Rep. Williams introduced State of Texas Operational Protections Act, or STOP Act, which would, in short, “affirm the State of Texas’ right to implement operational protections along the southern border, to authorize the State to construct a physical border wall in areas where the international border is not adequately protected with physical barriers, and to allow reimbursement from the Federal Government.”

If such a bill were to pass in the House and Senate, it could ostensibly put an end to the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Texas. However, getting legislation passed at the federal level can be quite a lengthy endeavor, assuming such legislation even makes it out of committees due to partisan disputes.

With the aforementioned in mind, Rep. Williams opted to send a letter to Biden’s head of the Justice Department, AG Garland, asking that the federal government put an end to the lawsuit as Texas is simply trying to protect their own border from the havoc wrought by illegal immigration.

The letter in question was not subtle in its delivery, asserting the Biden Administration has “failed the Texans and the American people with their open-border policies,” and that the state of Texas shouldn’t be “punished for this Administration’s refusal to enforce current immigration laws.”

Furthermore, while not explicitly addressing the Supremacy Clause claims outlined in the lawsuit against Texas, Rep. Williams’ letter to the Justice Department certainly seems to allude to the ostensible absurdity of such claims by mentioning, “The Justice Department’s argument that SB4 is unconstitutional neglects the fact that the Texas law simply follows current federal immigration law.”

For the sake of context, the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution has largely been interpreted as a tool asserting that state laws and constitutions cannot directly contradict federal laws and the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the Supremacy Clause was a direct response to the Articles of the Confederation era of the 1780s, where state courts didn’t have to recognize the federal government as being the supreme law of the land and could lead to contradictory laws at the state and federal level.

What Texas is attempting to do, and which Rep. Williams emphasized in his letter to the Justice Department, is show that there isn’t a contradiction of laws attempting to be enforced, but rather an emulation of existing federal law in the perceived absence of federal enforcement.

There are already a litany of state laws mirroring federal laws, from theft to homicide, yet the federal government has never claimed the Supremacy Clause as a means to strike down or file suit against state-level enforcement of said crimes as the matters are only delineated from a jurisdictional perspective.

The state of Texas isn’t trying to arrest and prosecute people in Florida or Arizona over unauthorized entry, but merely those who’ve unlawfully entered the state of Texas via entry without inspection – thus, a de facto mirroring of federal law which has historically gone unchallenged in terms of the scores of other collaborative state and federal laws addressing offenses.