The conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday dealt Texas a blow in its effort to keep buoy barriers in place in the Rio Grande in order to stop illegal border crossings.
The court ruled Texas must move the floating barrier to the riverbank and stop any work on the roughly 1,000-foot structure. It was the second defeat the court handed Texas last week. On Wednesday, a federal judge allowed U.S. Border Patrol agents to continue cutting razor wire the state installed along the riverbank, despite the protests of Texas officials.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, appearing on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo,” vowed to keep fighting.
“What Texas is going to be doing, we will be seeking what’s called an en banc ruling by the entire district court of appeals, and if we lose there, we will be taking that to the United States Supreme Court because we know Texas has the right to legally deploy those buoys in the water to prevent people from entering our country and our state illegally,” he said.
For months, Texas has asserted that parts of the Rio Grande are not subject to federal laws protecting navigable waters. But the judges said a lower court correctly sided with the Biden administration. Abbott said the appeals court reached a decision based on an outdated law.
“With all due respect, the appeals court got it wrong. And the reason is because they relied upon a law more than 100 years old, saying that we could not deploy these buoys in the water, preventing people from entering the United States illegally, because the waterway is categorized as a navigable waterway, which is absurd,” Abbott said.
“It is not navigable by definition when you have literally thousands of people able to walk across it every single day. It’s not used for transportation of boats up and down that riverway, and so it’s completely not navigable,” the governor continued.
The Biden administration sued Abbott over the linked and anchored buoys — which stretch roughly the length of three soccer fields — after the state installed the barrier along the international border with Mexico. The buoys are between the Texas border city of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Coahuila.
Thousands of people were crossing into the U.S. illegally through the area when the barrier was installed. The lower district court ordered the state to move the barriers in September, but Texas’ appeal temporarily delayed that order from taking effect.
In the lower court’s decision, U.S. District Judge David Ezra cast doubt on Texas’ rationale for the barrier. He wrote at the time that the state produced no “credible evidence that the buoy barrier as installed has significantly curtailed illegal immigration.”
“It is extraordinarily dangerous because we have people from China coming here. We also have people on the known terrorist watch list who are coming across the border, so there’s extraordinary dangers caused to our country by Biden’s open border policies, and obviously Biden is doing nothing about it,” Abbott said. “This is a very serious existential threat to our country caused by Joe Biden. And that’s exactly why Texas is taking extraordinary steps to try to crack down on it.”
Abbott also discussed a controversial border protection bill that recently passed through the Texas Legislature. He said he’ll sign it into law in two weeks.
“In two weeks I’ll be signing a new law in the state of Texas that will make it illegal for people to enter the state of Texas from another country illegally, and authorizing every peace officer in the state of Texas to arrest those people entering our country illegally,” he said.
