Texas has begun placing more buoys in the Rio Grande to impede unauthorized migrant crossings, despite a lawsuit by the Biden administration challenging the state’s power to do so, the office of Gov. Greg Abbott said on Wednesday.
Workers were extending what had been a 1,000-foot barrier of connected orange buoys in the river between Mexico and the city of Eagle Pass, Texas, which was a hot spot for illegal crossings last year.
The move on Wednesday was a direct challenge to the Biden administration, and signaled that the state of Texas expected to soon have a freer hand to conduct its own enforcement along the international border under the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump. The incoming administration could also choose to drop the federal challenge to Texas’s actions.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Mr. Abbott previewed the new effort during an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity Tuesday night.
“We’re not letting up at all,” Mr. Abbott said. “Tomorrow morning we’re going to be putting more buoys into the Rio Grande River, doing more to deny illegal entry into the state of Texas.”
It was not immediately clear how much length the new buoys will add to the existing barrier. But even with the addition, the barrier would affect only a very small fraction of the frontier between Texas and Mexico, which extends for 1,254 miles.
Crossings from Mexico have dropped sharply this year, after the Biden administration curtailed the number of asylum seekers who would be allowed to stay in the country while their immigration hearings proceeded. For the section of the Texas border that includes Eagle Pass, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded around 8,500 migrant encounters last month, down from 38,000 during the same month last year.
The lawsuit over the buoys has been moving through the federal courts since the Biden administration filed suit last year, arguing that by constructing the buoy barrier, the state had violated a federal law regulating navigable waters.
A district court judge in Austin sided with the federal government and issued an injunction to remove the buoys, calling them a “threat to human life.” But the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, among the nation’s most conservative federal appeals courts, later overruled the ruling and allowed the buoy barrier to stay while the case proceeded in the lower court.
A hearing in the case had been scheduled for just after Election Day, but it was postponed.
Texas has been preparing for the change in administration and for a large-scale deportation program promised by Mr. Trump and his advisers.
On Tuesday, the Texas land commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, sent a letter to Mr. Trump offering to provide a 1,400-acre tract of state land along the border “to construct deportation facilities.”
The land, in Starr County near Rio Grande City, was purchased by the state last month, Ms. Buckingham said in her letter.
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