Military Funds for Border Wall Construction reallocated by the U.S Supreme Court
Listen to this article The U.S Supreme Court inverted a lower court’s instruction that had streaked the Trump administration from using specific reallocated military funds to pay for construction of a wall along the U.S Southern border with Mexico. The court’s decision released about 2.5 billion U.S dollars in money that had originally been allocated by the U.S Congress for use by the Defense Department. It is important that Donald Trump failed in early 2019 to secure funding from Congress for the border wall. Trump has repeatedly pledged to construct a border wall, so he attempted to reallocate this money to spend on replacing existing border barriers with new walls in portions of California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
Various organizations, including the Sierra Club and the American Civil Liberties Union, sued to stop the reallocation of these funds, arguing that the president had overstepped his authority. A federal judge issued an injunction in May stopping the money from being used for construction pending the outcome of the legal dispute. A federal appeals court rejected the government’s request in July to lift the injunction. The Trump administration then took their case to the Supreme Court in mid-July and asked for an administrative stay that would lift the instruction pending the high court’s decision on whether or not it will hear the dispute.
The Sierra Club and others behind the lawsuit have argued that construction needs to be put on hold until the legal issues are resolved due to moving forward with construction could result in irreparable harm. Moreover, the U.S Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued that the government’s need to build the wall greatly outweighed the other parties “interests in hiking, bird watching, and fishing in designated drug-smuggling corridors”. Francisco had asked the court to decide on the stay before today, July 26, saying that if the funds were not freed up by that deadline, they would likely go back to the Treasury unspent and would need to be allocated by Congress all over again.
