Texas Simply Looks Weak -- And Foolish, Now... As Does USDC Judge [Team Tangerine] Tipton

On a nearly silent, snow padded Saturday morning in near white out conditions, here. . . we sip hot coffee, eat a banana and drink icy OJ. . . while the state-wide elected GOP loons down in Texas. . . twist, in the wind -- of over three decades of well-settled federal law. Grin.

Below is. . . ever more wood -- for the now roaring fire -- to burn up the lawless attempt by Texas to declare itself a "super-state" (or a mini-nation, if you prefer). Add this to the fine brief filed last night. Texas simply has no answer for any of this, and if Judge Tipton holds otherwise by or on the 23^rd, he is at best incompetent, and at worst. . . dishonest.

The Biden Administration also filed an excellent 55 page brief overnight. but the below is from RAICES, then -- a bit:

. . .The statutory provision on which Texas relies was enacted in 1996. Three years later, Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 525 U.S. 471, 484 (1999) (“AADC”), directly addressed the role of discretion in immigration enforcement and its relationship to the 1996 statute which contained that new provision. As Justice Scalia explained for the Court, “execut[ing] removal orders” is “prosecution of [a] stage[] in the deportation process,” and “[a]t each stage the Executive has discretion to abandon the endeavor.” Id. at 483 (first alteration in original). Thus, the Court made clear, executive branch authorities “may. . . decline to execute a final order of deportation.” Id. at 484. The Court further noted that the 1996 amendments were enacted against the backdrop of the executive branch’s prior “regular practice . . . of exercising that discretion for humanitarian reasons or simply for its own convenience.” Id. at 483–84. Far from doing away with the discretion to stay removals, Congress enacted other provisions in the 1996 law that sought “to give some measure of protection to” such “discretionary determinations,” including—specifically—determinations regarding deferred action (an executive branch decision to decline to enforce certain removal orders). Id. at 485.

In other words, the Supreme Court has already recognized that under the very statute on which Texas relies, the executive branch retains its longstanding discretion to stay removal. See also Nken v. Holder, 556 U.S. 418, 439–40 (2009) (Alito, J., dissenting) (“Once an order of removal has become final, it may be executed at any time” -- but “the Executive Branch” may still “stay its own hand.”). The Fifth Circuit has likewise affirmed this principle. Texas v. United States, 809 F.3d 134, 167–68 & n.105 (5th Cir. 2015) (quoting AADC); see also Naidoo v. INS, 39 F. Supp. 2d 755, 761 (W.D. La. 1999) (“Requests for stays . . . are committed to the discretion of the” executive branch).

Texas does not grapple with AADC and its progeny. Instead, it focuses on a single word in § 1231(a)(1)(A) -- “shall” -- contending that Congress thus eliminated the executive branch’s longstanding discretion to stay removal for those in the removal period. But it is a “fundamental principle of statutory construction (and, indeed, of language itself) that the meaning of a word cannot be determined in isolation, but must be drawn from the context in which it is used. . . .”

All soon to be sorted out -- against the lawless characters who still sit -- in state-wide elected offices in the State of Texas. Time to go run the shovel for a bit of a workout. . . smiling; ever smiling.

नमस्ते