Texas officials just won a major procedural battle over the state's controversial border law. On Friday, April 24, 2026, the full Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wiped out the preliminary injunction that had kept Senate Bill 4 on ice, opening the door for Texas to start enforcing it.
The court did not bless the law itself. Instead, it ruled that the nonprofit groups and El Paso County that sued over SB 4 did not have the legal standing required to bring the challenge. In other words, the Fifth Circuit cleared a key obstacle without touching the big constitutional questions that have made this statute a lightning rod.
The appeals court put it in stark terms: "We vacate the preliminary injunction." The judges concluded that the organizations and the county had only "voluntarily incurred costs" while advocating for their clients and therefore could not show the kind of concrete injury federal courts demand. On that basis, the court declined to reach the substance of the claim that federal immigration law preempts SB 4. The order is publicly available on CourtListener.
What SB 4 Does
Senate Bill 4, passed by the Texas Legislature in 2023, creates new state-level crimes for unlawful entry and unlawful reentry and gives state magistrates power to order people back to the foreign country from which they entered. It lets Texas peace officers arrest people they suspect have entered the state unlawfully and lays out procedures for those state-ordered returns. The full statutory language and structure are available from LegiScan.
How the Federal Court Got Here
This fight has been grinding through the courts for years. A federal district judge first blocked SB 4 with a preliminary injunction. A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit weighed in after that, and then the full court agreed to rehear the matter en banc before issuing Friday's decision.
As Bloomberg Law points out, the Fifth Circuit took a narrow route: it handed Texas immediate authority to enforce SB 4 while sidestepping a sweeping ruling on whether states can create and enforce their own immigration offenses. Given the stakes, legal observers say more appeals are all but guaranteed.
Reactions
Attorney General Ken Paxton wasted little time celebrating on social media, calling the ruling "a major win for public safety and law and order," according to The Texas Tribune.
Immigrant-rights groups, by contrast, have been sounding alarms about SB 4 from the start. They warn it will fuel racial profiling and damage immigrant communities across Texas. Advocacy organizations, including the ACLU and local partners, have repeatedly argued that the law is preempted by federal immigration authority and say it threatens civil liberties and the delivery of local services.
Legal Implications
By tossing the case on standing grounds, the Fifth Circuit went out of its way to say it was not deciding whether SB 4 conflicts with federal law or violates the Constitution. The opinion leans on recent Supreme Court precedent that tightened the rules for organizational standing and notes that the Department of Justice voluntarily dismissed its own separate challenge in March 2025, leaving private plaintiffs to carry the case forward.
The practical bottom line: SB 4 can now be enforced unless and until another court steps in, but its ultimate legality is still an open question and could be revisited on appeal.
For Texans, the immediate impact is procedural rather than dramatic. State law enforcement agencies now have a clear path to implement SB 4, even as the larger constitutional showdown over states writing and enforcing their own immigration crimes continues to loom. More filings and more appellate jockeying are almost certainly coming.
