Biden administration tells Supreme Court Texas is barring federal government’s access to part of US-Mexico border

Originally Published: 12 JAN 24 09:13 ET

Updated: 12 JAN 24 09:22 ET

By Devan Cole, CNN

(CNN) — The Biden administration told the Supreme Court early Friday that Texas is effectively blocking US Border Patrol agents from accessing a portion of the US-Mexico border, stressing that new barriers recently erected by the state “reinforce” the federal government’s need for the high court to quickly intervene in the matter.

“Texas’s new actions since the government’s filing demonstrate an escalation of the State’s measures to block Border Patrol’s ability to patrol or even to surveil the border and be in a position to respond to emergencies,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in court papers.

“Those actions have also changed the situation on the ground from the account in prior filings in this Court, including Texas’s opposition,” she added. “Those developments reinforce the need for this Court to vacate the court of appeals’ injunction, and to do so as soon as possible.”

The filing, coming shortly before 2 a.m. ET Friday, underscores how urgent the federal government views the Supreme Court’s intervention in the matter. Last week, the Justice Department asked the court to step in on an emergency basis to wipe away a lower-court order directing Border Patrol agents to stop removing concertina wire put in place by Texas while the state’s legal challenge to the practice plays out.

The overnight filing said that the new barriers erected by Texas this week included not only more concertina wire along a part of the Rio Grande River, but also “new fencing, located further inland than the original concertina wire,” gates and military Humvees, among other things. Photographs of the new barriers were included in the filing.

“Because Border Patrol can no longer access or view this stretch of the border, Texas has effectively prevented Border Patrol from monitoring the border to determine whether a migrant requires the emergency aid that the court of appeals expressly excepted from the injunction,” Prelogar wrote in the filing.

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