If you’ve become more concerned about the recent escalating tensions between Texas and the federal government over how best to control the border, you’re not alone.
Erin Corcoran, an immigration expert at the University of Notre Dame, also has been following the situation closely.
The Supreme Court last week ruled that the Border Patrol can dismantle barbed wire that Texas has installed along the border. But Republican Governor Greg Abbott has defiantly vowed to continue erecting the wire, citing a clause of the Constitution that empowers border states to act in the event of an invasion.
This comes about four months after the Republican-controlled Alabama Legislature defied a Supreme Court order to create new congressional district lines. The court ruled Alabama had violated the Voting Rights Act by packing the state’s Black voters into one district to dilute their power. It ordered the Alabama legislature to create a second majority Black district, but the Legislature has refused.
Immigration lawyer Erin Corcoran, executive director of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for Peace Studies, says this new trend of states thumbing their noses at the nation’s highest court is troubling.
"There's sort of a larger more structural thing that is really troublesome, that's happening, where you're having states activity defying the highest court rulings in the land, and basically saying they have no validity," Corcoran says. "
Corcoran likens the situation to the 1960s when President Johnson had to federalize the National Guard to force southern states to desegregate schools.
"These acts by these states, in refusing to comply with the highest court in the land, which is the only court that's written into the U.S. Constitution, potentially portends a constitutional crisis in our country."
