On Monday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily stopped a lower court order that allowed Border Patrol agents to continue severing concertina wire. Texas had put it in place on the banks of the Rio Grande.
Then on Wednesday, a U.S. district judge ruled against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office. They wanted Border Patrol agents to discontinue cutting the wire. The judge noted that Texas didn’t display enough evidence to prove that the federal government has violated the law. However, Judge Alia Moses did show opposition to the federal government’s immigration guidelines overall.
The next day, Paxton’s office appealed the order, and then on Monday, the New Orleans-based appeals court issued a stay on Moses’s ruling. This gives President Biden’s administration an opportunity to respond by Friday.
In October, Paxton filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, stating that Border Patrol agents unlawfully destroyed state property when its agents cut through the state’s concertina wire. They did so in order to help migrants illegally get over the border, he claimed.
However, the Biden administration responded by saying that Border Patrol agents cut the wire to give medical assistance to migrants in distress or when migrants have already gotten passed the Rio Grande into U.S. territory and must be taken into custody.
In the last three years, the Texas Military Department has spent $11 million to put 70,000 rolls of this particular wire in different parts of the Texas-Mexico border.
