Salimah Khoja & Paulina Leyva Hernandez

Volume 27.2 (download PDF)

Abstract

In 2023 the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 4 (“S.B. 4”), which empowers state and local law enforcement agencies to engage in immigration enforcement by arresting and deporting migrants who are suspected of crossing the southern border. Anti-immigrant state laws like Texas’s S.B. 4 and Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070 (“S.B. 1070”) were created to test the limits of state power and limit the reach of federal immigration enforcement within the states. Legal challenges to state laws like S.B. 4 and S.B. 1070 demonstrate the ongoing tension between federal and state governments related to authority over immigration matters, even though immigration has been within the federal government’s purview since the early days of the United States, as recognized by the judiciary for more than a century. This Note focuses on the immigration preemption doctrine and argues that the Supreme Court should declare S.B. 4 unconstitutional, while protecting states’ ability to continue creating humane, immigrant-inclusive policies without impermissibly disrupting the fabric of federal immigration enforcement actions.