The big news of the day is that the Supreme Court has TEMPORARILY allowed Texas to enforce a state immigration law that gives police the power to arrest illegal aliens [BREAKING: In Major Blow to Biden Regime, Supreme Court Allows Texas to Enforce Immigration Law That Gives Police Power to Arrest Illegals, Gateway Pundit, March 19, 2024]. While this sounds good and many conservatives are doing victory laps, it is premature. The case is still winding its way through the court system.
It is also unclear how this will play out. Will Texas be allowed to deport illegal aliens back to Mexico? If they are Mexicans, they may want to go back voluntarily, but if they came all the way from Uzbekistan, then they may opt for a court trial. Assuming they are convicted, what happens to them then? Do they serve some time in the Texas corrections system and then get released into the United States? Traditionally, Mexico has often refused to take back non-Mexicans, what we called OTMs (pronounced Oh-Tee-Ems by the BP and making them sound like an Indian tribe). I saw several times where Hondurans or Nicaraguans would pretend to be Mexican in the hopes of going to Mexico instead of getting a plane flight back to Central America. The Mexican Customs would kick them back to us, and we line Agents were ordered to go pick them up from the border and return them to the station for further processing.
I can remember one guy, I think he was El Salvadoran, who refused to confess that he was an El Sal (our abbreviation for them). We had a lot of Mexican American BP Agents who could tell by accents what nationality a person was. They tried to get him to admit that he wasn’t Mexican, but had no luck. We sent him back across the bridge to Mexico. About an hour later, we got a call from Mexican Customs to come back and pick him up, he had confessed to being an El Sal. I don’t know what they did to him, but he broke down in tears in the transport van while I gave him a ride back to the station. They may have shoved a handgun up his ass. (Mexican police are notoriously corrupt. The U.S. State Department is continually issuing travel advisories for different parts of Mexico.)
Traditionally, in order to deport someone, it has been necessary to obtain either a passport or “travel documents” (often issued by a foreign embassy). I can remember talking to a Deportation Officer who told how they were trying to deport an African criminal for four years with no luck (I think it was Sudan, but don’t quote me). Under Obama, the African government simply refused to issue passports or travel documents for their criminals in the United States. When Trump came in, the administration threatened to revoke visas from that country. You would not think that was a big deal to a corrupt African country, but it got the Africans to rescind that policy immediately and their felon found himself on a flight within a week after waiting in limbo for years.
Going back to the Texas law itself (again, which is still winding its way through the courts), I remember when Arizona attempted to defend itself against Obama’s invasion. The Supreme Court wound up giving a mixed ruling that shot down a lot of the provisions of the Arizona law, although the state law mimicked a lot of federal law. One of the things the Court struck down was making it a crime for an illegal alien to work or to apply for work. Justice Antonin Scalia dissented from the left wing of the Supreme Court, then composed of Kennedy, Roberts, Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor.
Dissenting Justice Scalia said of it:
“States had a long-time role in regulating immigration, and the Constitution did not eliminate their power to do so, he said. “Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it,” he wrote. “The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign state.”
Supreme Court Overturns Three Sections of Arizona Immigration Law, Upholds Papers Check, by Debra Cassens Weiss, ABA Journal, June 25, 2012
I have little faith in the Supreme Court ruling in favor of Texas in the long run. As I recall about the Arizona law, before the ruling, some columnist was saying that it would be a slam dunk win for Arizona because back in 1977 a similar California law had been upheld by the high court. (Remember in 1977 California was conservative, before mass immigration transformed it.) I don’t think court precedent means what it used to mean.
Chief Justice Roberts has said that there are no Obama judges or Trump judges. To the layman observing from a distance, that’s a Texas-size piece of bull. I don’t know why judges lean so far left. IMHO, it’s because Leftist rulings give the court more power, not less. They’ve completely destroyed the 10th Amendment because that would interfere with their power.
