Texas stands at a rare and narrow window of opportunity. With an America-First administration still in the White House, Texas has a partner in the fight to secure our land from those who seek to invade, infiltrate, and corrupt her. For the first time in years, federal courts are receptive to originalist arguments, clawing back decades of liberal case law.
This is not the time for half-measures, polite requests, or waiting on federal permission slips. It is the moment for Texas to pass legislation that forever enshrines our sovereign right, rooted in the original understanding of the Constitution, to defend our borders and protect our people from hostile invaders. Whether they come waving cartel flags, smuggling death across the Rio Grande, or carrying ideologies that seek to replace Texas law with foreign doctrines, the threat is the same.
Cartels have long considered our border an open highway for crime, fentanyl, and human trafficking. Foreign terrorist organizations have exploited the same gaps that decades of federal policies have left wide open. And because of a half-century of extremely permissive immigration policies that have brought millions from anti-Western Muslim countries, there are now growing enclaves within our state working to impose Sharia law and parallel societies that directly contradict the Texas Constitution and the American way of life.
These are not benign “immigration” issues. They are invasions that undermine our security, our culture, our rule of law, and our constitutional republic. Texans who have followed the fight against political Islam and groups pushing for enclaves that reject American law understand exactly what is at stake. The Tenth Amendment was written precisely so states would not be forced to stand idle while their people and their way of life are undermined from within.
The Republic of Texas would never have tolerated this, and she never agreed to surrender the tools needed to stop it.
From 1836 to 1845, Texas stood as a fully sovereign nation forged in blood. For nine years, we fought Mexico for our independence. We maintained our own army and navy. We controlled our own borders. We decided who could enter, who could settle, and who had to leave. The Republic’s 1836 Constitution and early laws reflected this reality: land grants went to settlers who swore loyalty to Texas; citizenship could be earned after six months’ residence and an oath. Border defense was not some abstract federal concern; it was daily survival against a hostile neighbor that refused to accept our independence.
Mexican forces hammered that lesson home with shocking regularity in 1842 alone. In March, General Rafael Vásquez marched 700 troops into San Antonio, raised the Mexican flag, and declared Mexican law in effect. Just six months later, General Adrián Woll struck again, capturing the city a second time and seizing the courthouse while the district court was in session.
Among the prisoners marched to Mexico was Samuel A. Maverick, a signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence. These were not pinprick raids. San Antonio was occupied twice in one year. Every Texan understood that controlling who crossed the Rio Grande was a matter of life and death.
When statehood was on the table in 1845, Texans knew exactly what type of Union they were joining. The Joint Resolution of Annexation, passed by Congress on March 1, 1845, and approved by the Texas Convention on July 4, is crystal clear. Texas entered the Union “on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever.” We kept our public lands. We kept responsibility for our public debt. We retained the right to divide into as many as five states later if we chose. The United States agreed to settle boundary disputes with Mexico and to assume responsibility for external military threats. That was the deal: federal help against invading armies, not federal monopoly over who walks across our soil or settles in our communities.
Crucially, the annexation debates in both the U.S. Congress and the Texas Convention contain zero discussion of surrendering immigration enforcement or border sovereignty to Washington. None. Not a single word about stripping Texas of the police powers that every state exercised in 1845. In that era, states across the Union routinely ran passenger inspection laws, demanded bonds from shipowners to cover potential public charges, excluded criminals and the diseased, and quarantined arrivals. New York and Massachusetts had done so for decades, and this was standard practice under the original public meaning of the Constitution. While it granted Congress power over naturalization and “Commerce with foreign Nations,” it was silent on a general federal power to regulate the admission, exclusion, or removal of aliens. Because the powers of the federal government were intended to be few and enumerated, these specific powers were naturally understood to be reserved under the 10th Amendment to the states and the people.
When Texans decided to join the union, they had every reason to expect that they could continue to exercise immigration enforcement powers that they had flexed while independent. The Republic of Texas would have rejected annexation outright if anyone had suggested we would be required to stand helplessly by while foreigners poured in to overthrow or undermine the State of Texas.
Yet just thirty years later, a judicial rewrite of the Constitution completely defied the original public meaning of the Constitution.
In 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Henderson v. Mayor of New York and its companion Chy Lung v. Freeman. In two unanimous opinions written by Justice Samuel F. Miller, the Waite court declared that the “whole subject” of immigrant admission belonged exclusively to Congress under the dormant Commerce Clause. New York’s bonding and head-tax requirements for arriving passengers were struck down as impermissible state regulation of foreign commerce. California’s law giving a single commissioner discretionary power to exclude or demand bonds from “lewd or debauched women,” paupers, criminals, or likely public charges (in practice targeting Chinese arrivals) met the same fate. The court warned of foreign relations embarrassments and insisted that uniformity demanded federal control.
These decisions were not rooted in the text, history, or original understanding of the Constitution. In fact, they marked a sharp break from earlier precedent. Just decades before, in Mayor of New York v. Miln (1837), the court had upheld a similar New York inspection law as a valid exercise of state police power to protect public welfare. Henderson and Chy Lung flipped that understanding on its head, treating immigration as an inherent attribute of national sovereignty rather than a reserved state power. Later cases, such as Arizona v. United States (2012) built on this foundation by invoking field preemption to strike down key parts of Arizona’s SB 1070 by restricting the right of states to enact crimes for illegal entry or authorize arrests based solely on federal immigration status (even when the federal government refuses to enforce the law).
These rulings had the effect of erasing the 10th Amendment in this arena, and yet no state has the opportunity to ratify these decisions. Certainly, the Republic of Texas never agreed to a Constitution with this understood limit on the powers of states. Without question, these decisions represent nothing less than a judicial power grab that left sovereign states defenseless against the very threats our founders sought to prevent.
Texas must lead the charge to quickly reverse this trajectory while we have an administration and courts supportive of returning power to states like Texas, which will fight to secure America even if a future administration refuses to do its constitutional duty.
With the 90th Legislature approaching, it is crucial that we pass laws that restore the original balance of power between Washington and the states that our founders intended. Texas must seek to regain the right to exercise general police powers to protect the public welfare in accordance with Article 1, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution and the 10th Amendment. These measures would affirm the state’s authority to arrest, detain, and remove non-citizens who enter unlawfully or who threaten public safety. They would also permit strong action against citizens or non-citizens operating to undermine our constitutional order; whether through cartel violence or efforts to impose foreign legal systems like Sharia in Texas communities.
This is not radical. It is restorative. It is a return to the federalism the Republic of Texas expected when it joined the Union in 1845. The current Supreme Court has shown it is willing to correct long-standing errors when they conflict with constitutional text, history, and structure. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization reminded us that bad precedent does not become sacred just because it is old. Henderson and Chy Lung are exactly the kind of doctrinal overreach that deserves fresh scrutiny.
The Republic of Texas never surrendered its borders. It never agreed to federal supremacy over immigration enforcement. It expected to retain the sovereign tools needed to protect its people from those who would do us harm, whether foreign armies in 1842 or modern threats today.
Now is the time for Texas to reclaim what was always ours. The Legislature must move forward with legislation that enshrines these reserved powers once and for all, and let the courts confront the historical record. Let them explain why the men who twice fought off Mexican occupations of San Antonio would have meekly accepted the notion that Texas has no right to banish those who seek to undermine us in 2026.
The fight to #SaveTexas is not about waiting on Washington. It is about remembering who we are and what the Republic never gave away. Our sovereignty demands it, our people deserve it, and the original understanding of both the U.S. and Texas Constitutions supports it. The window is open. Texas must lead.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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