Supreme Court Clears Trump to Build 100 Miles of Border Fencing

The U.S. Supreme Court cleared President Donald Trump’s administration to start using disputed funds to construct more than 100 miles of fencing along the Mexican border, letting him take his biggest step yet toward erecting his long-promised wall.

With four justices at least partially dissenting, the justices lifted a lower court freeze that was designed to block the spending while a lawsuit by the Sierra Club and another advocacy group went forward.

The Supreme Court’s order marks the first time it’s acted in the dispute over the national-emergency declaration Trump issued in February in a bid to free up federal money for the wall.

The wall segments in Arizona, New Mexico and California will give Trump a tangible achievement to tout in his campaign for re-election. Until now, congressional and court resistance had thwarted significant progress toward a stronger barrier on the almost 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) frontier. During his first campaign, Trump said Mexico would pay for the wall.

The 30-foot steel bollard fencing will replace barriers that the Trump administration says are dilapidated and ineffective. Some of those existing barriers are designed only to prevent vehicles from crossing and don’t stop pedestrians.

A federal trial judge in Oakland, California, blocked the Defense Department from diverting $2.5 billion originally appropriated for other purposes. The Pentagon sought to transfer the money into its counter-narcotics fund, saying it would build barriers in stretches of the border used heavily by drug smugglers.

A San Francisco-based federal appeals court agreed that the spending should be blocked while the litigation went forward.

Trump declared the emergency after Congress approved only $1.4 billion of the $5.7 billion he sought for the wall this fiscal year. The House and Senate both voted to cancel Trump’s plan but weren’t able to override his veto.

The $2.5 billion is the first chunk of almost $7 billion in Pentagon and Treasury Department funds that the emergency declaration was designed to tap.

Risk of Delay

U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court that the administration risked not being able to use the money at all if the order wasn’t lifted with enough time before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

“If the injunction remains in place, it may foreclose DOD’s ability to obligate the funds,” Francisco wrote. “If so, it may effectively operate as a final judgment.”

The solicitor general said the order “frustrates the government’s ability to stop the flow of drugs across the border in known drug smuggling corridors.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, representing the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition, said allowing the spending now would damage the environment, “dramatically upend the status quo,” and let the administration “irretrievably commit taxpayer funds in contravention of Congress’s considered spending judgment.”

The groups said the administration was seeking to “construct a permanent wall this summer -- before Congress has a chance to consider and pass another budget.”

The case is Trump v. Sierra Club, 19A60.

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