Supreme Court denies request to halt construction of the border wall
View of a section of the new border fence between Mexico and the US in Mexicali, Baja California state, Mexico on March 10, 2018. President Trump is expected to inspect the border wall prototypes during his visit to California on March 13. / AFP PHOT
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote has denied a request to halt construction of President Trump's border wall over environmental concerns.
A number of groups, including the ACLU and Sierra Club, had asked the high court to get involved again after the justices last year cleared the way for the administration to use military funds for construction while the case played out in the courts.
A federal appeals court had ruled against the administration last month, but the justices, for now, have given another temporary victory to the administration.
"The fight continues,” said Dror Ladin, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Every lower court to consider the question has ruled President Trump's border wall illegal, and the Supreme Court’s temporary order does not decide the case. We’ll be back before the Supreme Court soon to put a stop to Trump’s xenophobic border wall once and for all.”
The four liberal justices dissented from Friday’s order.
In June, the Supreme Court also declined to hear an appeal from a coalition of environmental groups that pushed back against the Trump administration's construction of the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, challenged a 1996 law giving the president authority to fight illegal immigration and border crossings, and limiting some legal challenges.
The coalition claimed that the Trump administration did not conduct sufficient environmental impact studies for the construction and that endangered species like the jaguar and Mexican wolf would be adversely affected by the barrier.
They had asserted in their case that the law’s allowance for the secretary of Homeland Security to waive any laws necessary to allow the quick construction of border fencing violates the Constitution’s separation of powers. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had dismissed the case, citing a prior case from 2007 with "a nearly identical context."
"This Court finds that precedent persuasive, and it compels the conclusion that Plaintiffs' complaint fails to state plausible constitutional claims as a matter of law," the Circuit Court's ruling said.
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Fox News' Alex Pappas, Ronn Blitzer, and The Associated Press contributed to this report.