Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin signed on to an amicus brief Wednesday in support of a Texas law which would make it a state crime, enforceable by state authorities, to cross the US-Mexico border without authorization.
He is joined by officials from 21 other states who are not directly involved in the court case but who are lobbying the appeals court to overturn a previous ruling which had struck down the law.
Texas Senate Bill 4 was challenged by the U.S. Justice Department on the grounds that it would “intrude on the federal government’s exclusive authority to regulate the entry and removal of noncitizens.”
“Texas cannot run its own immigration system,” the Department of Justice wrote in a January complaint against the State of Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott, the Texas Department of Public Safety and its director.
The law was rolled back in the Western District of Texas and is now on appeal before the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans.
“The national immigration crisis has rendered ‘every state [] a border state,’” the amicus, or “friend of the court” brief begins.
“Amici States bear the brunt of the significant economic, health, and public safety issues generated by this mass migration crisis and the federal government’s failure to adequately enforce national immigration laws.”
Arkansas joins the other states in lobbying the appeals court to overturn the district court’s decision and reinstate the Texas law. Among them are Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
A representative for the Arkansas attorney general declined to comment on the brief but Griffin responded to written questions in a statement on Friday.
“More than 9 million illegal immigrants have entered the country—making every state, including Arkansas, a border state,” Griffin said.
“States have the power to enact legislation to protect the safety of their citizens and the ability to make unlawful under state law that which is already unlawful under federal law,” he continued.
He did not address questions about the specific nature of Arkansas’ immigration crisis.
The amicus brief came just a day after Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders deployed 40 Arkansas National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border for “surveillance and reconnaissance” of unauthorized crossings.
This is not the first time that Texas has come up against the federal government over its border control policies. In the summer of 2023, Abbott installed a floating barrier made out of buoys, intended to stop migrants from crossing the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas, a move also challenged by the federal government.
In January, the Biden administration took legal action against Texas in order to stop the state from installing razor wire along the border.
Both of these border measures were justified by way of a disaster proclamation that Abbott originally made in 2021 and renewed, saying in a release of the proclamation that “the surge of individuals unlawfully crossing the Texas — Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent threat of disaster,” the Associated Press reported.
Litigation in both cases is ongoing.
The think tank Migration Policy Institute’s most recent available data, from 2022, shows that 0.3% of all foreign-born people in the United States, including those without authorization to be in the country, lived in Arkansas.
For context, 11% lived in Texas, 10% each in New York and Florida and 23% in California.
Wyoming, with the fewest immigrants of any state, had less that 0.1% of the country’s foreign-born residents. West Virginia, Montana and South Dakota each had 0.1%. All of the states to sign on to the amicus brief except for Ohio, Georgia and Virginia had less than 1%.
More than a fifth of all immigrants in the U.S. live in the New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles metro areas.
