Texas’ Immigrant Arrest and Deportation Law Allowed by Court (1)

Texas will be able to arrest and deport migrants who enter the country illegally following a Fifth Circuit ruling that a nonprofit and El Paso County lack standing to challenge a state-level enforcement measure.

The split decision gives the state unprecedented immigration enforcement authority that has long been understood to be exclusive to the federal government. The decision vacating a preliminary injunction says only that the plaintiffs lack authority to challenge the measure, which Texas passed in 2023, and doesn’t weigh in on whether it’s lawful.

By a 10-7 vote, the court rejected the standing argument because the law “is enforceable only against aliens illegally present in Texas, not against advocacy organizations or Texas counties,” the opinion said.

The group and the county tried to move the case forward after the Trump administration last year abandoned a lawsuit the Biden administration initiated against the Texas law.

“These plaintiffs voluntarily incurred costs to advocate for clients. Under recent Supreme Court precedent, that falls far short of conferring standing,” the opinion said.

In a dissent, Judge Priscilla Richman said the nonprofit and the county have standing based on economic harm and that law is unconstitutional because federal law permits Texas only to assist the federal government in apprehending undocumented people. Texas, she wrote, can’t come up with its independent enforcement scheme.

“It is farcical to suggest that it would be business as usual, with no difference in enforcement between the federal and state laws, if Texas is permitted to enforce its own immigration laws,” Richman wrote.

Richman’s dissent was joined in whole or in part by Judges Carl Stewart, Leslie Southwick, Stephen Higginson, Irma Carrillo Ramirez, James Graves, and Dana Douglas.

The decision allows Texas to finally enforce the law, SB 4, three years after state lawmakers approved it amid a surge of unlawful border crossings that Republicans blamed on the Biden administration. SB 4 creates state-level crimes for illegal entry and re-entry and authorizes state judges to initiate deportations. Before Friday, two courts — including a Fifth Circuit panel — blocked the law citing a longstanding principle that states can only assist the federal government in enforcing federal immigration laws but can’t come up with their own state-level laws.

The case is of such nationwide importance that it could be taken up by the US Supreme Court, which in 2012 decided a similar case involving Arizona’s ability to enforce state-level immigration penalties and largely ruled the state lacked that authority.

Friday’s opinion from the full court rejected a divided panel’s finding from July 2025 that Las Americas had standing in the case because it would incur additional expenses in distributing information on the change in law to its migrant clients.

The organization was left with no allies in the case after the Justice Department dropped its appeal in March 2025, two months after Trump re-took office with a mandate to secure the southern border and deport scores of undocumented migrants.

The case is USA v. Texas, 5th Cir. en banc, No. 24-50149, 4/24/26.