Court Reverses Ruling, Allows Trump To Use Military Money for Border Wall
President Donald Trump was handed a big win in court Friday with regard to his battle to build a wall on the country’s southern border with funds diverted from the Pentagon.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a lower court ruling from December 2019, which found using Defense Department funds for border security was unlawful.
The lower court had sided with the petitioners in a lawsuit that challenged the legality of using billions of dollars to shore up the porous border with a physical barrier.
The Associated Press reported an El Paso County, Texas, and a nonprofit group called the Border Network for Human Rights had no legal standing to challenge how military funds are used for construction projects.
The court also found that the petitioners in the lawsuit were not harmed by the project.
In particular, El Paso County argued that a canceled $20 million project at the Fort Bliss military base would hurt the area economically as DoD funds were used simultaneously on a border wall.
“El Paso County must show that the county itself has suffered an injury,” the court wrote.
“Even if El Paso County’s alleged economic injury were cognizable, the county fails to demonstrate that the injury is redressable by a favorable decision in this case. To establish redressability, a plaintiff must show a ‘substantial likelihood’ that the requested relief will remedy the alleged injury in fact,” the court’s opinion stated.
The ruling further concluded that “enjoining the Government from spending the diverted funds on border wall construction does not necessarily result in the Government’s use of those funds on the Fort Bliss project.”
As much as $3.6 billion from those funds had been allocated to build the border wall.
Those funds were only part of a total of roughly $6 billion in funds Trump decided to use for the project last year.
Trump took the route of using DoD funds after Congress refused to fund the construction of the wall.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has sided with plaintiffs against the wall, and its funding, in a separate lawsuit.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to allow the case to come forward for a review, the AP said.
The AP reported the panel of judges with the Fifth Circuit court noted they disagreed with the ruling from the Ninth Circuit.
The Friday ruling is another turn in the road for Trump’s charge to make border security a top priority.
The president campaigned in 2016 for a border wall and has exercised numerous alternatives to find funding for it in the absence of congressional backing.
His decision to divert Pentagon funding to erect the wall coincided with a national emergency declaration on the border.
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