What Texas is (and is not) doing to defy a Supreme Court setback

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said this week he will continue to defend his state’s border despite a 5-4 Supreme Court order that the US Border Patrol can take down razor wire Texas set up along portions of the US border with Mexico.

Questioning the court’s action, the Republican governor criticized its lack of clarity when it sided with the Biden administration, which wants to remove the razor wire while a legal challenge to Abbott’s actions plays out.

“There were no sentences, or paragraphs or pages of an opinion written by the Supreme Court, so no one knows at all what they were thinking – all we know is that they wanted to send it back to the 5th Circuit,” Abbott said on Fox News, arguing, “There was no opinion about anything – about razor wire, what Texas is doing or anything like that.”

The razor wire issue is playing out as part of a larger standoff in which Abbott argues by not acting more forcefully at the border, the federal government has violated its responsibility to protect the state from “invasion.”

Is this a governor essentially ignoring the Supreme Court? Why is the federal government in charge of border policy in the first place? I went to CNN’s Supreme Court analyst Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, with those questions. Our conversation, conducted by email, is below.

WOLF: How does Abbott justify essentially ignoring the Supreme Court?

VLADECK: It’s really important to stress that two different things are true: First, Abbott is not “essentially ignoring” the Supreme Court. Second, he is interfering with federal authority to a degree we haven’t seen from state officials since the desegregation cases of the 1950s and 1960s.

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