The Trump administration filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court on Wednesday asking the justices to lift a lower court’s injunction halting border wall construction in Texas’s Big Bend region.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer pleaded to the high court to lift a “baseless injunction that halts a major portion of the construction of the border wall,” issued by the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas earlier this month. U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, blocked three waivers issued by the Department of Homeland Security that allowed for border wall construction, siding with environmental activists who sued to halt construction in the region.
The activists claimed that the construction would harm the environment in the region, including Big Bend National Park, and that the DHS secretary did not have the authority to waive the regulations to move forward with construction. The Department of Homeland Security pointed to broad authority under the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 to waive requirements for building walls in high illegal entry areas, including the Big Bend region.
“The court illogically concluded that respondents’ aesthetic and recreational harms ‘outweigh’ the government’s extraordinarily strong border-security and operational interests in ensuring that 25% of the U.S.-Mexico border has adequate protective barriers,” Sauer wrote in his emergency petition. “The notion that respondents’ interest in ”escap[ing] from modern life” in the ‘wild spaces in the Big Bend Sector’ and preserving ‘the spiritual, recreational, and aesthetic value of the area,’ surpasses the United States’ paramount interest in preventing a quarter of the border from becoming a magnet for cartel exploitation defies credulity.”
The DOJ argued that “both unlawful and unprecedented” ruling is the first time a court has attempted to override DHS’s waiver for border wall construction.
“Only this district court has seen fit to trample Congress’s clear authorization of waivers to facilitate border-wall construction and its equally clear judicial-review bar by repackaging a statutory-authority argument in constitutional garb,” Sauer wrote. “Such judicial usurpation of Congress’s commands and the Secretary’s authority amply warrants a stay.”
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The Supreme Court does not have a set timeline for issuing emergency docket rulings and can either grant or deny the request at any time.
The Trump administration has been largely successful on the high court’s emergency docket but has faced some key losses. The most recent loss came in a case Wednesday where the administration was seeking to enforce a federal prison policy barring transgender surgeries for inmates pending litigation.