WaPo: “A divided federal appeals court dealt a major blow to a new Texas law that empowers state officials to detain and deport migrants, ruling that it will remain on hold and saying that the statute tramples on broad federal control of immigration.
The 2-1 decision late Tuesday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit follows a lower-court ruling in February that said the state law is probably unconstitutional.
In the majority decision, the circuit’s chief judge, Priscilla Richman, wrote that Congress “left no room” in U.S. law for state officials to intrude on immigration enforcement, even as she sympathized with Texas’s predicament as a border state amid a historic influx of migrants.”