Biden's immigration treachery

 Andrew McCarthy:

The photographs that should be seared in your memory from the Del Rio debacle are not those of Border Patrol agents on horseback, defamed by their federal superiors — and in particular, by President Biden himself — for daring to do their job.

Focus instead on the photos of police vehicles arrayed in long, imposing rows on the American side of the river — state police vehicles, ordered to secure the border by the governor of Texas.

Does Governor Abbott have the authority to deploy a “steel wall” of Lone Star State troopers? Well, he has the raw power to do it, and in crisis conditions, that is what tends to matter. And — capped by White House oracle Jen Psaki’s astonishing assertion that the “migrants” Democrats are inviting into our country don’t need the COVID vaccines Biden is mandating for Americans because “they are not intending to stay here for a lengthy period of time” — the administration’s ineptitude was sufficiently humiliating that Biden hasn’t challenged Abbott’s démarche . . . yet, anyway.

As it happens, I believe the state of Texas does have the authority to exclude illegal aliens. But it is a debatable question thanks to a century of federal jurisprudence, culminating in Obama-era Supreme Court decisions that sided with the federal government’s willful refusal to perform its basic constitutional duties, and against the basic constitutional principle of state sovereignty — of which self-defense is an ineliminable element.

As I argued at the time, this is a mortal threat to what makes the United States united.

The late, great Justice Antonin Scalia framed the matter starkly while dissenting in Arizona v. United States (2012): Imagine if Article I had granted Congress the power “to establish Limitations upon Immigration that will be exclusive and that will be enforced only to the extent the President deems appropriate.”

That was the interpretation of the Constitution that the Obama–Biden administration urged, and the Court indulged, in denying the state of Arizona its presumed sovereign power to defend its citizens from the ravages of mass illegal immigration. True to form, Scalia posed the third-rail question that few cared to touch: “Would the States conceivably have entered the Union if the Constitution itself contained the Court’s holding?”
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Originally, the states were responsible for policing trespassers in their territories. As Justice Scalia’s bracing question suggested, the retention by the states of the power to exclude people who lacked the legal right to be present was elemental and assumed. During the 20th century, Washington and its courts gradually divested the states of their primacy over immigration enforcement. Yet, the arrangement remained tolerable because the states were prohibited only from contravening federal law — meaning congressional statutes and regulations consistent therewith. And that law unambiguously instructs that illegal border-crossers be detained and removed.

The Obama–Biden administration took the radical position that the states were preempted from contravening not only federal law but also federal policy — meaning the executive administration’s preferences, including its distortion of the concept of prosecutorial discretion into a license to flout the president’s core constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully. Ergo, by Obama–Biden lights, if the presidential administration chose to refrain from enforcing congressional statutes and chose to abdicate its fundamental duty to secure our borders, the states — including border states such as Texas that would bear the brunt of these derelictions — were powerless to defend themselves.

That is not our Constitution but its antithesis. As Scalia succinctly observed, had such a notion been peddled to the states in 1787, “The delegates to the Grand Convention would have rushed to the exits.”
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Understand: This is a blatant violation of federal immigration law, as I pointed out last month in discussing another iteration of Biden’s eradication of Texas’s sovereign right to self-defense. The governing congressional statute commands that aliens who do not have a legal right to be present in the United States “shall be detained pending a final determination of credible fear of persecution and, if found not to have such a fear, until removed” (emphasis added). It is impeachably lawless for Biden to release thousands upon thousands of illegal aliens into our country.

It is not just that the administration knows the majority of the “migrants” will never report as directed to immigration agencies or make court appearances — under circumstances in which they have no plausible claim of a right to be here. The blunt fact is that, while Biden has a constitutional obligation to secure the border, he has no legal authority to “parole” illegal immigrants into the country.
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We will need a voter's rebellion in 2022 to stop this utter lawlessness of the Biden administration.  There needs to be a mass rejection of Democrat politicians who support this absurd dereliction of duty by the President.