The harrowing pronouncement Scalia would make about President Trump’s authority to secure our own border

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“What does sovereignty mean if it does not include the ability to defend your borders?” ~Justice Antonin Scalia, April 25, 2012, Arizona v. U.S. (oral arguments)

President Trump seems to have been given the impression that he has no legal options to secure our border, no matter how rapidly the situation deteriorates, so that he feels he must get Mexico to secure our border for us. Given that this entire crisis was spawned by California judges, it might be worthwhile to go back and explore what a real judge said about national sovereignty.

In 2012, when the border crisis was a fraction of today’s magnitude, Justice Scalia believed that even a state like Arizona had the right to enforce its sovereignty and not allow in illegal aliens, despite the loose policies of the federal government. When he asked Obama’s solicitor general during oral arguments in Arizona v. U.S., “What does sovereignty mean if it does not include the ability to defend your borders?” he was referring to even Arizona’s right as an individual state to defend its own borders. “The Constitution recognizes that there is such a thing as State borders and the States can police their borders, even to the point of inspecting incoming shipments to exclude diseased material,” said Scalia during litigation between the Obama administration and the state of Arizona. He never could have imagined we’d be debating the federal power to secure the border of the entire union.

Scalia was so passionate about even state sovereignty as held against illegal immigrants that he read his partial dissent in the case from the bench when the decision was announced on June 25, 2012.

“But there has come to pass, and is with us today, the specter that Arizona and the States that support it predicted: A Federal Government that does not want to enforce the immigration laws as written, and leaves the States’ borders unprotected against immigrants whom those laws would exclude. So the issue is a stark one. Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws?”

Now we have a president who wants to enforce our laws, yet carefully shopped district judges are saying otherwise. Could anyone have imagined, not just a state, but the entire federal union “at the mercy of” a lower court judge’s refusal to recognize this nation’s immigration laws and its own long-standing judicial precedent on staying out of questions of entry at our border?

Read the rest from Daniel Horowitz HERE.

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