Environmental advocacy groups renewed their legal challenge to funding for the border wall Tuesday.
The lawsuit challenges the Trump administration’s decision to take $7.2 billion appropriated by Congress this year for the Department of Defense and transfer those funds to border wall construction. The groups also are asking a federal judge to declare that the Trump administration’s waivers of environmental and public health laws to speed up wall construction in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas are unconstitutional.
Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, along with Defenders of Wildlife and the Animal Legal Defense Fund, filed the lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C. Numerous lawsuits have been filed in recent years to block the border wall, including a 2019 lawsuit by the groups that filed Tuesday’s lawsuit. Wall construction continues while those lawsuits make their way through the courts.
Congress appropriated $1.375 billion for wall construction in 2019 and again in 2020, but denied the Trump administration’s requests for billions more in wall funding. President Trump declared an emergency in early 2019 and started transferring defense department funds to build the border wall.
“Construction of a wall that cuts through the heart of vitally protected refuges, forests and conservation areas will have devastating effects on wildlife, such as jaguars, Mexican gray wolves and ocelots, who call the border their home,” Animal Legal Defense Fund Executive Director Stephen Wells said in a news release Tuesday.
“Using national emergency powers to fund construction of a border wall is illegal and misguided, particularly when the nation is currently facing a real national emergency stemming from the type of outbreak that occurs from disrupting the natural world,” Wells said.
"We're tough as saguaros," editorial cartoonist David Fitzsimmons says. He says he saw a video made for the people of Detroit and became inspired to do his own take for Tucson.
Federal officials recently announced plans to use $1.5 billion of the defense department’s anti-drug smuggling funds to build 74 miles of 30-foot tall wall along the border near Tucson. Construction started last year on 63 miles of wall near Tucson at a cost of $1.3 billion from the same funding source. Hundreds of millions of dollars more are being spent to build a wall near Yuma, although those funds are drawn from a variety of sources.
As of Monday, 181 miles of new wall had been built along the U.S.-Mexico border, with plans to build 550 more miles, according to a tweet from Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott.
