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Court Asked to Block Another $3.6 Billion in Border Wall Funds

Court Asked to Block Another $3.6 Billion in Border Wall Funds

(Bloomberg) -- Environmental and political activists are back in court in an effort to persuade a federal judge to block $3.6 billion in border wall funding from the Defense Department that President Donald Trump made available by declaring a national emergency in February.

The Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition plan to ask U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Wednesday to rule that Trump and the Defense Department broke the law by using a purported national emergency as an “end-run” around Congress’s refusal to fund the projects.

The same judge earlier this year prohibited the use of $2.5 billion for construction of parts of the wall in California, Arizona and New Mexico. The U.S. Supreme Court stepped in, however, and allowed construction to proceed while the administration appealed the judge’s ruling.

Court Asked to Block Another $3.6 Billion in Border Wall Funds

The $3.6 billion was made available through a different procedure and Gilliam had declined to block the use of those funds in May because the administration hadn’t yet disclosed what it planned to do with the money. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is arguing the case on behalf of the two organizations, construction using the $3.6 billion will start as soon as Friday.

“To fund the border wall, defendants are stripping billions of dollars from military construction projects that DoD previously told Congress were necessary to support servicemembers and military missions,” according to the organizations.

The fight over the wall funding caused a 35-day partial shutdown of the government that was resolved when Congress approved $1.375 billion for the project that Trump has made a key goal of his presidency. Trump declared a national emergency at the southern border in February that required the use of military construction funds.

The Sierra Club and SBCC argued that U.S. law under which Trump declared the emergency doesn’t authorize the use military funds for civilian law enforcement purposes.

The law only allows the president to use money that was approved for military construction projects to fund a declared war or a national emergency that requires the use of the armed forces, according to the organizations. Immigration enforcement is a civil undertaking, they said.

The case is Sierra Club v. Trump, 19-cv-00892, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (Oakland).

To contact the reporter on this story: Edvard Pettersson in Los Angeles at epettersson@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Joe Schneider, Peter Blumberg

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