Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has told a right-wing radio host that there’s only one tool the state isn’t using to stop migrants from crossing the border into Texas: gun violence, because it would prompt a response from the pesky federal government.
“The only thing that we are not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border—because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder,” the Republican governor told former NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch on her radio show last week.
For folk in the States it’s a mix of the 4th, 5th and 14th Amendments of the Constitution with mostly individual state laws determining the validity of what constitutes an officer of the law and how a citizen arrest works as part of that individual State’s Criminal code.
If you’re Canadian it’s federal law 494 of the Criminal Code.
To be honest it’s really bloody difficult trying to accurately cite US law in discussion because States have a frankly ridiculous amount of binding power on their citizens which means there are 50+ laws about how exactly citizen versus peace officer arrest is handled… But most of them outline fairly specific limitations like it whether a citizen’s arrest can be applicable for misdemeanors, restrictions on what constitutes a reasonable use of force, rights of an arrested person, what constitutes a humane restriction of person and the requirement of validating the arrest with a judge within a certain time period… You know Haebeous Corpus and all that.
Biden’s Presidential powers probably give him a lot of extra leeway against laws that would persecute him for doing an improper citizen’s arrest but that wouldn’t make an improper arrest stick any more than if you did it. A President is still legally a citizen and not a law enforcement officer.