A South Texas rancher by the name of Michael Vickers is leading the lawsuit, and Kinney County, Atascosa County, and the Kinney County sheriff are other plaintiffs in the case. They contend that the Biden-Harris administration has adopted policies that are "at odds" with Congress' authority and have allowed massive numbers of illegal aliens to flood into the country.
"They're making two claims," reports lead counsel Chris Hajec of the Immigration Reform Law Institute. "The first one is a take care claim under the Constitution; the Constitution requires the president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed."
Instead of executing immigration laws, Hajec says the president has inverted them by adopting policies that have caused a "major border crisis."
The other claim is related to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which says that every time a federal agency adopts a policy that will affect the environment, they have to do a study that looks into how the policy will affect the environment and addresses whether it is worth the impact.
"The Department of Homeland Security is supposed to do that for all of its immigration policies," the attorney notes. "All these things bring millions more people into the country and cause a lot of environmental damage in the process. A lot of that's happened on Doc Vickers' ranch."
Vickers' ranch, which lies just 70 miles north of the border, has reportedly incurred more than $50,000 in gate and fence damages alone, and he has spent thousands more to prevent further environmental destruction. Illegal aliens leave trash and litter behind on his property, which affects food and water resources for animals and livestock.
The plaintiffs are asking the court to vacate the president's unlawful border policies, to order the government not to create other policies that would cause a crisis, and for environmental studies to be done before future policies are issued. As it is, Hajec says no environmental impact studies are ever done.
In January, a divided Supreme Court allowed Border Patrol agents to resume cutting razor wire that Texas installed along a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border that is at the center of the standoff between the Biden administration and the state over immigration enforcement.
More recently, though, an appeals court ruled that a floating barrier in the middle of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas can remain there for now. A federal court also ordered the Biden administration to continue border wall construction using the roughly $1.4 billion that Congress appropriated for the purpose, and the Department of Homeland Security has been forced to stop rubber stamping immigrants' applications without verifying information provided by parolees or their sponsors.
