DOJ Sues Arizona for Allegedly Violating Federal Law, Neglects to Mention Biden’s Gross Violations of Federal Law

It gets tiresome to point this out, but it is necessary: The Biden administration is blatantly, willfully violating federal immigration law, even as it audaciously accuses others of lawlessness.

As Brittany’s report details, the Justice Department has sued the state of Arizona for standing up a barrier on a section of the border. The state is being overrun and overwhelmed by illegal aliens because the Biden administration refuses to enforce the southern border. Arizona is obligated to protect its citizens and uphold the law, especially given the federal government’s criminal dereliction of duty. Consequently, under the direction of Governor Doug Ducey, the state has erected a makeshift wall — double-stacked shipping containers.

To repeat for the umpteenth time, binding federal law — Section 1225(b)(1)(B)(IV) of Title 8, U.S. Code, which is supposed to control the government’s treatment of aliens whose entry and presence in our country are illegal — unambiguously states: “Any alien subject to the procedures under this clause shall be detained pending a final determination of credible fear of persecution and, if found not to have such a fear, until removed” (emphasis added).

The Biden administration claims that it cannot enforce this congressional statute because the federal government lacks sufficient detention space and because court rulings call for aliens who seek asylum to have certain due-process protections. But that is absurd.

First, if there is insufficient prison space, the solution is to close the border, not to admit illegal aliens in excess of the number that can be detained. (There are about 30,000 detention spaces; last year alone, over 2 million illegal aliens crossed the southern border.) Second, the court decisions can easily be harmonized with the statute: Don’t admit more illegal aliens than can be detained, and give those who are admitted (which would be the far smaller number) due process consistent with the court decisions. Finally, even if it were true that the statute and the court decisions were in conflict that would mean the Biden administration had to make a decision about which to follow. That is, Biden is choosing not to comply with the statute. The administration should not be heard to claim it must follow the court rulings; it has no more authority to ignore a statute than to ignore court decisions. The president has made a deliberate choice to flout the law enacted by Congress, whose authority to prescribe rules governing the treatment of illegal aliens is indisputable.

Under the circumstances, the complaint the Justice Department has filed against Arizona is mind-blowing. The feds complain that the state has “cut down or removed scores of trees, clogged drainages, and degraded the habitat of species listed under the Endangered Species Act.” Its wall is “blocking approximately thirty naturally occurring ephemeral watercourses, which will interrupt natural watershed patterns, erode soil in the immediate area, and damage vegetation and forage” (i.e., who cares what happens to people as long as the naturally occurring ephemeral watercourses are protected). The wall is further said to be blocking the federal Forest Service and other “law enforcement functions” (which apparently don’t include enforcing federal law). It is exposing law-enforcement officials to danger by preventing them from seeing “armed scouts for transnational criminal organizations” — never mind the federal government’s policy of allowing the citizens of Arizona and the United States to be besieged by transnational criminal organizations. The wall is preventing the federal government from undertaking its own wall construction — construction that the Biden administration and Democrats have opposed as an inhumane and environmentally harmful legacy of the Trump era.

How is it tolerable for a presidential administration to violate the law blatantly, to endanger Arizonans by willfully failing to execute its border-security duties, and then to sue a sovereign state — alleging that the state is in violation of the law while avoiding any mention of the administration’s own lawlessness?