Attorney General Alan Wilson leads 22 state coalition supporting Texas state law prohibiting illegal immigration

(COLUMBIA, S.C.) – Attorney General Alan Wilson led a coalition of 22 states supporting a Texas law that makes illegal immigration a state crime and authorizes state officials to enforce it. 

“Joe Biden has created a border crisis of historic proportions,” said Attorney General Alan Wilson. “His Administration’s flagrant and repeated pattern of ignoring national immigration laws has allowed more than 7.5 million illegal aliens to enter the country and forces the states to deal with the consequences. Texas’s state law banning illegal immigration is absolutely Constitutional, and I’m glad to lead a coalition to defend it.”

The amicus brief filed by the states in support of Texas’s law argues, “States also bear an obligation to their citizens to address the attendant public crisis. That obligation implicates one of Amici States’ core sovereign prerogatives—enacting legislation pursuant to their police powers to protect their citizens’ safety… Relatedly, Amici States have a paramount interest in ensuring that their validly enacted state laws are not improperly held unconstitutional under incorrect preemption analyses.”

Texas’s state law, SB4, makes illegal immigration into Texas a state crime and allows state magistrates and judges to order those who have crossed the border illegally back to the country from which they entered. The U.S. government and private plaintiffs filed suit over the law. A U.S. District Court blocked the law, and the case is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

Attorney General Wilson co-led this amicus brief with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and was joined by Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Read the full amicus brief here.