The Supreme’s threw it back to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals….
They will keep things on hold while they decide the case…..
Lawyers for Mr. Abbott and the state of Texas were headed to a federal appeals court on Wednesday for what the governor has appeared to be seeking all along: a showdown with the federal government over Texas’s power to set its own immigration policy.
The legal battle is over the state’s most ambitious and audacious challenge yet to federal supremacy over immigration: a new law, signed by the governor, that makes it a crime for migrants to cross without authorization into Texas from a foreign country, punishable by jail time, deportation by the state, or both.
Even before a final ruling in the case, Mr. Abbott was able to briefly celebrate a win on Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the law, known as Senate Bill 4, to take effect, at least temporarily. For a few hours, the state of Texas was empowered by the high court to take immigration enforcement more fully into its own hands.
But officers in Texas had not yet made arrests under the law when, later in the day on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an order dissolving its earlier stay and restoring, for the moment, an injunction blocking implementation of the law.
The ultimate outcome in the case remained an open question. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit was set to hear arguments on whether to set aside the injunction during the many months it would take for Texas to appeal the ruling, or restore the injunction and keep the law on hold while the case went through the appeals process….