The law, which empowers local officials to arrest and deport migrants who enter the country without authorization, was challenged by the Biden administration as an affront to federal power.
The Supreme Court temporarily sided with Texas on Tuesday in its increasingly bitter fight with the Biden administration over immigration policy, allowing an expansive state law to go into effect that makes it a crime for migrants to enter Texas without authorization.
As is typical when the court acts on emergency applications, its order gave no reasons. But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, filed a concurring opinion that seemed to express the majority’s bottom line.
They were returning the case to an appeals court for a prompt ruling on whether the law should be paused while an appeal moves forward, Justice Barrett wrote. “If a decision does not issue soon,” she wrote, “the applicants may return to this court.”
For now, though, Texas law enforcement officials will be allowed to arrest people suspected of crossing the border illegally. How long that remains true is now a question for the appeals court.
The three liberal members of the court — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented.
“Today, the court invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Texas passed a law that directly regulates the entry and removal of noncitizens and explicitly instructs its state courts to disregard any ongoing federal immigration proceedings. That law upends the federal-state balance of power that has existed for over a century, in which the national government has had exclusive authority over entry and removal of noncitizens.”
