The government of Texas and the Biden administration are in a legal standoff over a public park along the U.S.-Mexico border, where Texas National Guard soldiers have blocked access to Border Patrol officials, The Hill reports. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton repudiated a demand from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide Border Patrol officials access to Shelby Park in Eagle Pass. Paxton’s response followed a cease-and-desist letter dated Sunday, in which DHS general counsel Jonathan Meyer demanded that Texas officials stop blocking Border Patrol access and that they remove barriers in the park. The issue was escalated by the drowning deaths of three migrants in the Rio Grande near Shelby Park on Jan. 12. Meyer wrote that Texas officials prevented Border Patrol agents from entering the park to assist a Mexican rescue operation. Paxton denied that claim and said federal officials did not request access to the park the night in question.
The use of National Guard troops to prevent the Border Patrol’s access to the border is an escalation in an ongoing fight between Texas and the Biden administration over how immigration and border security policy should be enforced. The Biden administration says it’s complying with asylum law by detaining and processing foreign nationals who cross the border unauthorized between ports of entry. Paxton expressed a different interpretation of the law. “Quite apart from the Shelby Park specifics, your demand letter rests on a more fundamental misunderstanding of federal law and the role of sovereign States within our constitutional order. This much is clear from your invocation of a federal statute that gives U.S. Border Patrol warrantless access to land within 25 miles of the border, but only ‘for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States,'” wrote Paxton. “President Biden has ordered your agency to do the exact opposite, in keeping with his open-borders campaign promise. There is not even a pretense that you are trying to prevent the illegal entry of aliens.”