White House moves to suspend judge’s border wall ruling
The Trump administration on Wednesday appealed a federal judge’s ruling that halted the president’s border wall and asked the judge to allow construction immediately, saying the ruling was erroneous and is allowing drugs to pour across the border.
“Every day that this injunction remains in place irreparably harms the government’s ability to stop the flow of illegal drugs entering the United States,” Justice Department lawyers told U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam of Oakland in asking for a stay of the ruling he issued Friday.
They asked Gilliam to make a quick decision on a stay, without hearing arguments from opponents of the wall, and said they would take their request to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals if he has not ruled by next Wednesday. The administration appealed Gilliam’s decision to the Ninth Circuit in a separate filing.
Gilliam, the first federal judge to consider lawsuits challenging the wall, blocked the first stages of construction in border areas near El Paso, Texas, and Yuma, Ariz. He said President Trump had exceeded his legal authority by ordering a project that Congress had refused to pay for.
Trump sought $5.7 billion last year in wall funding from Congress, which approved only $1.375 billion for limited barrier construction. The president then vetoed an appropriations bill and closed down many government operations for 35 days, the longest shutdown in U.S. history.
He declared a national emergency over illegal immigration on Feb. 15 and said he would fund the wall with $8.1 billion already in the budget for other purposes, mostly Defense Department programs.
Gilliam’s ruling blocked the diversion of $1 billion that Congress had approved last year for Defense Department antidrug operations. He rejected the administration’s argument that Congress, which has constitutional authority over federal government spending, had not actually refused to fund the wall because it never expressly prohibited the transfer of Defense Department funds.
“Congress was presented with — and declined to grant — a $5.7 billion request for border barrier construction,” Gilliam said.
The ruling came in a suit by the Sierra Club and the immigrant-advocacy group Southern Border Communities Coalition. In Wednesday’s filing, Justice Department lawyers told Gilliam he should have dismissed their suit, because private parties have no right “to challenge a federal agency’s decision to transfer funds between internal budget accounts.”
Current barriers “are no longer able to effectively stop illegal drugs from entering the United States” and are being bypassed by “transnational criminal gangs,” government lawyers wrote. They did not mention a recent Drug Enforcement Administration report that said most drug smuggling takes place across U.S. ports of entry, not open borders.