(CN) - Texas state and county officials told a U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel Wednesday that a lower court erred in denying them qualified immunity in a lawsuit claiming they kept migrants detained through Texas's Operation Lone Star long after they were eligible for release.

The lawsuit focuses on two Texas border counties, Kinney County and Val Verde County, where immigrant rights advocates claim that four migrants arrested under the border security initiative remained locked up as much as six weeks overdue. The suit accuses state and local officials of creating complex systems for processing release paperwork for migrants detained through the initiative that were separate from systems for other arrestees.

The advocates say these systems, which required paperwork to pass through multiple different officials, frequently resulted in excessive detention and that the officials in charge knew about this problem but failed to create policies to fix it.

But lawyers representing various officials told the panel that their actions were the result of "a very unusual circumstance."

Scott Tschirhart, an attorney representing the sheriffs of the two counties and the county clerk for Kinney County, suggested release delays should be attributed to the high number of arrestees coming from Operation Lone Star.

"Operation Lone Star flooded Val Verde and Kinney Counties with a tremendous number of arrestees, most of which were arrested by DPS," Tschirhart said. "And so there was approximately 208,000 arrests in the first year of the program. So you go from a sleepy county like Kinney County, who normally wouldn't have very many prisoners in jail, to having thousands of prisoners that were ostensibly in custody, but within facilities that were controlled by the state."

Only the federal government has the authority to enforce immigration laws, but as part of Operation Lone Star, a state-run border security initiative Texas Governor Greg Abbott launched in March 2021, National Guard soldiers and state troopers have flocked to the U.S.-Mexico border for a "catch and jail" program where individuals suspected of illegally crossing the border are arrested on state-law trespassing charges.

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod asked Celin Carlo-Gonzalez, an attorney representing the migrants, if there were any prior cases dealing with qualified immunity for release delays in unprecedented situations. She pointed out that Abbott declared a disaster at the southern border in authorizing Operation Lone Star.

"That's a huge declaration. The governor has made a disaster declaration and renewed it every month - this is being renewed as a disaster." Elrod, a George W. Bush appointee, said. "Hurricane Katrina is a disaster, and we had interrupted court operations."

Carlo-Gonzalez responded that the degree to which there was a disaster that caused excusable delays is a fact issue that should be decided through further proceedings.

Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Carolyn Dineen King criticized the multistep process for processing detainees' release paperwork, saying it seemed "archaic."

"I mean, you talk about paperwork being processed and a whole series of places where it has to get to and move on from and so on, and it's just a disaster waiting to happen," King, a Jimmy Carter appointee, said. "And nobody is losing any sleep over it, I would bet, except the people who are the victims of it."

U.S. Circuit Judge James Graves, a Barack Obama appointee, joined Elrod and King on the panel.

Source: Courthouse News Service