Texas Can Keep Rio Grande Floating Barriers for Now, Appeals Court Rules; Texas Can Keep Buoys in the Rio Grande While Legal Challenge Continues, Federal Appeals Court Rules

Texas can keep Rio Grande floating barriers for now, appeals court rules:

Texas can keep its floating buoy barrier in the Rio Grande in place — at least for now, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily halted District Court Judge David Ezra’s Wednesday order for Texas to remove the thousand-foot-long barrier put in place by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott earlier this year in an effort to deter smugglers and migrants from crossing the river border with Mexico.

The temporary stay will remain in place until the Fifth Circuit can hear Texas’ appeal of Wednesday’s district court order.

“If Texas must move the buoys from their current location, its appellate rights are effectively lost because the harm is already done to Texas’s sovereign self-defense and public-safety interests,” lawyers for Abbott and the Lone Star State argued in their request for stay.

“The buoys were deployed under the Governor’s constitutional authority to defend Texas from transnational-criminal-cartel invasion,” Texas’ court filing in the fifth circuit continued.

“Moving the buoys exacerbates dangers to migrants enticed to cross the border unlawfully, and to Texans harmed by human trafficking, drug smuggling, and unchecked cartel violence.” —>READ MORE HERE

Texas can keep buoys in the Rio Grande while legal challenge continues, federal appeals courtrules:

A federal appeals court granted Texas’ request to leave its floating barrier in the Rio Grande Thursday evening, a victory for the state that reversed a federal judge’s order issued one day earlier.

Federal District Judge David A. Ezra ruled on Wednesday that Texas must remove a string of buoys, installed to deter migrants from crossing the Rio Grande, siding with the federal government after it sued the state for placing the barrier in an international waterway.

Gov. Greg Abbott’s office immediately appealed Ezra’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, saying in a statement after Ezra’s order that it “is prepared to take this fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“Today’s court decision merely prolongs President Biden’s willful refusal to acknowledge that Texas is rightfully stepping up to do the job that he should have been doing all along,” the statement says. “We will continue to utilize every strategy to secure the border, including deploying Texas National Guard soldiers and Department of Public Safety troopers and installing strategic barriers.”

In issuing a preliminary injunction to remove the barrier, Ezra wrote, “Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier. Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters.”

The New Orleans-based federal appeals court granted the state’s request to halt the temporary injunction, but did not provide further details. A hearing date has not been set yet. —>READ MORE HERE

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