Indeed, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbot pointed out in the defiant letter he sent to Biden after the Justice Department filed its lawsuit, “hundreds of migrants have drowned in the Rio Grande River trying to cross the border illegally.”
Prevent drownings and unlawful crossings? Stop the brutal human smugglers of the drug cartels? For whatever reason, the Biden administration simply can’t allow such effective policies to exist.
The federal law that the lawsuit is based on is 33 U.S.C. § 403. That provision bans the “creation of any obstruction…to the navigable capacity of the waters of the United States” and makes it unlawful to build a “wharf, pier, dolphin, boom, weir, breakwater, bulkhead, jetty, or other structures in any port, roadstead, haven, harbor, canal, navigable river…outside of established harbor lines” without the permission of the Army Corp of Engineers.
Gov. Abbott, who is a lawyer and the former attorney general of Texas, says in his July 24th letter that the statute does not “describe any action by the State of Texas.” He is implying that the type of floating barrier Texas has created is different than the type of permanent or semi-permanent fixed structures described in the statute such as a wharf or pier.