“Confirmed Judges, Confirmed Fears” is a blog series documenting the harmful impact of President Trump’s judges on Americans’ rights and liberties. It includes judges nominated in both his first and second terms.
Trump Judge Andrew Oldham dissented in a Fifth Circuit case that would have allowed Texas to enforce a harsh law targeting and harming undocumented immigrants. The July 2025 case was United States v. Texas.
What was this case about?
In 2023, Texas passed a law (Senate Bill 4, or SB4) making it a state crime punishable by imprisonment for undocumented immigrants who enter or are present in Texas. The law empowered state officials to deport such individuals. The Biden administration, El Paso County, and private immigrant-rights organizations sued to block enforcement of the law. They argued that SB4 was illegal because the Constitution and federal law give Congress and the federal government, not the states, the power to police immigration.
In early 2024, a federal district court judge agreed and barred enforcement of the law while litigation continued. Because the United States clearly had standing to sue, the judge did not need to address whether the other parties would have had standing had they sued alone.
In 2025, the Trump administration withdrew the United States as a party to the case. But the private organizations continued their lawsuit, and the case is still called United States v. Texas.
Texas asked the Fifth Circuit to reverse the lower court. The state argued that none of the remaining parties had standing to continue the case. Texas also argued that SB4 was legal.
What happened at the Fifth Circuit, and what would Oldham have done?
A panel majority rejected Texas’s arguments in an opinion written by Priscilla Richman (a George W. Bush nominee) and Irma Ramirez (a Biden nominee). Oldham dissented.
Oldham wrote that the plaintiffs did not have standing in part because the law would be enforced on individuals, not on nonprofit organizations that choose to serve those individuals. So, according to Oldham, the nonprofits were more like the anti-abortion doctors who the Supreme Court held lacked standing to challenge FDA drug approvals in last year’s Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case.
But the majority explained that their situations are not at all comparable. It is not simply the case that one of the nonprofits disapproves of the law and might spend some money dealing with its effects. To the contrary, its “core activity” is providing legal, counseling, and referring services to low-income immigrants. SB4 would force it to spend enormous funds helping immigrants caught up in the state law. In addition, paying employees to effectively represent those caught up in SB4 would force it to cut back its representation of clients caught up in federal immigration enforcement.
On the substance of whether SB 4 was illegal, Oldham cited examples where Congress has invited specific limited state cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. According to Oldham, this means Congress has not preempted expansive state laws like SB4.
But the majority noted that Supreme Court precedent has long made clear that the power to control immigration is “exclusively” a federal power. The panel cited numerous examples showing that Congress has not granted states the blanket authority to supplement and potentially undercut the nation’s laws on entry and exit with their own sets of requirements, limitations, and penalties. The panel therefore upheld the 2024 decision of the district court to block enforcement of SB4.
(Texas is not the only state that has recently enacted its own anti-immigration law. Several days after the Fifth Circuit decision, the Supreme Court without explanation or noted dissent allowed a lower court’s decision blocking enforcement of a similar Florida law to remain in effect.)
This ruling illustrates the importance of our federal courts to protecting our rights and the significance of having fair-minded judges on the federal bench.