News & Commentary

From the beginning of his campaign for president, Donald Trump claimed that he was going to build a wall along the southern border. He said “nobody builds walls better than me.” He said the wall would be “big” and “beautiful.” He said someone else would pay for it. And he said it would be built so fast that “your head would spin.”Last night, for the first time, a federal judge made clear to President Trump he couldn’t get his wall by illegally diverting taxpayer money. The judge’s ruling comes in an ACLU lawsuit on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition (SBCC). Together, the Sierra Club and SBCC represent the communities who live in, protect, and treasure the lands and communities along our southern border. For years, these communities have engaged in the democratic process and successfully persuaded their congressional representatives to deny President Trump funding to build his wall.Our lawsuit centers on the question of whether the president abused his power to divert funds for a border wall Congress denied him. Unfortunately for President Trump, the Constitution is clear on the matter: only Congress has the power to decide how taxpayer funds are spent. And Congress, like border communities, said no to the President’s wall.Congress didn’t bow to Trump’s pressure even after he caused the longest government shutdown in U.S. history over his demands for billions of dollars for his wall. Congress allocated only a fraction of the money that Trump demanded, and imposed restrictions on where and how quickly any border barriers could be built. In a blatant abuse of power meant to circumvent Congress, President Trump declared a national emergency on February 15, 2019, and announced he would illegally divert $6.7 billion from military construction and other accounts for the border wall project. From the beginning, the emergency was obviously a sham. Trump said as much himself when he declared the emergency, saying he “didn’t need to do this” but he’d prefer to build the wall “much faster.” He added that he declared a national emergency because he was “not happy” that Congress “skimped” on the wall by denying him the billions he demanded.Despite this, the Trump administration tried to argue in court last Friday that Congress never actually “denied” President Trump the billions of dollars he is now trying to take from the military. The court rejected the administration’s argument, reminding the administration that “the reality is that Congress was presented with—and declined to grant—a $5.7 billion request for border barrier construction.”The court’s ruling blocks the sections of wall that the Trump administration announced would be built with military pay and pension funds. It also invites us to ask the court to block additional projects as they are announced in the future. The judge emphasized the government’s commitment to inform the court immediately about future decisions to build.It may be easy to ridicule President Trump’s desperation for a border wall — an absurd and xenophobic campaign promise for which he has only himself to blame. But as pointless and wasteful as it may be, Trump’s campaign promise now threatens to cause irreparable and real damage to our constitutional checks and balances, the rule of law, border communities, and the environment.The wall is part of an exclusionary agenda that President Trump has targeted, over and over, at people of color. From his notorious Muslim Ban, to his efforts to eliminate protections for immigrants from Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, courts have found “evidence that President Trump harbors an animus against non-white, non-European” immigrants. Trump has repeatedly justified his wall by lying about border communities, falsely claiming that America needs a wall.Border communities know firsthand that walls are dangerous and wasteful. They divide neighborhoods, worsen dangerous flooding, destroy lands and wildlife, and waste resources. As our clients explained to the court, “we are a community that is safe, that supports migrants, that works well together and supports one another, that is worthy of existence.” What border communities truly need is infrastructure and investment, not militarization and isolation. The court’s order is a vindication of border communities’ advocacy for themselves, and of our Constitution’s separation of powers. As the court wrote, “Congress’s ‘absolute’ control over federal expenditures—even when that control may frustrate the desires of the Executive Branch regarding initiatives it views as important—is not a bug in our constitutional system. It is a feature of that system, and an essential one.”

Update May 2021: In the three years since Claudia’s death, the Gómez González family is still desperate to know what happened and why their daughter was killed. In May 2020, we filed a lawsuit on behalf of the family seeking damages from the U.S. government for her wrongful death at the hands of the Border Patrol agent who shot her dead. As of today, the federal government has indicated the ongoing FBI investigation is near completion. But until we have justice for Claudia’s senseless death, we will not stop fighting for her and her family.

In a desperate attempt to escape immediate threats to their life, the Castro* family fled their home country of El Salvador, hoping to make it to the U.S.-Mexico border to seek refuge. What they found instead at the port of entry in Eagle Pass, Texas, were cruel U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and no protection to be found.

Visit our Legislation Tracker to learn more about the bills that will make a huge impact on Texas during the 2019 Texas Legislature.  

This piece originally appeared at The New York Times. 

On Tuesday night, President Trump will address the nation in a primetime speech in which he’ll make his case for a 1,000-mile border wall, followed by a trip to South Texas’ Rio Grande Valley on Thursday.But Trump’s characterization of the situation on the southwest border is driven not by facts but by his own nativist agenda and political obsession with building a wall. In advance of the speech, here are some things you might hear, fact-checked.Lie 1: Border crossings are at or near an all-time high.Border crossings are at some of the lowest levels in decades. Trump and his aides fabricate facts and spread misinformation in order to justify many of the president’s false claims about the border, even though the Department of Homeland Security itself reports differently. The Border Patrol’s own statistics show that the number of migrants apprehended at the border last year was the fifth lowest total since 1973.While the Trump administration has repeatedly cited increased migration from Central America as a national security-based justification for the wall, a majority of these migrants are families and unaccompanied children who voluntarily present themselves to immigration authorities. Indeed, the average Border Patrol agent is apprehending fewer than two people per month, and about 60 percent of these migrants are families and children.Lie 2: Terrorists are entering the country through the southern border, creating a national security crisis.Many of the migrants at our southern border are refugees from violence with a right to apply for asylum in the United States. Many are families with young children or children alone. There is no evidence that any terrorist group is sending people through Central America.White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was recently called out for making false claims about thousands of supposed terrorists attempting to enter the country through the U.S.-Mexico border. The Justice Department confirmed to NBC News that “no immigrant has been arrested at the southwest border on terrorism charges in recent years.”Lie 3: The wall would stop gang members.The Trump administration has claimed that a wall is needed in order to stop gang members from coming into the U.S., but many of these migrants are in fact fleeing gang violence and recruitment in their home countries. We have also seen a pattern where government officials have wrongly labeled young migrants as gang members with false and unsubstantiated claims, hyping the threat of groups like MS-13 and threatening the rights of innocent young people.Trump is raising the spectre of gangs to spread harmful stereotypes about immigrants, distort and invent numbers of alleged gang members apprehended at the border, and punish the very people who are most affected by gang violence.Lie 4: The wall would stop drugs from pouring in through the border.The president likes to suggest that construction of a border wall will help bring an end to drug addiction problems in America.However, the clear majority of illegal drugs, including opioids, enter through legal ports of entry, and a wall would have no impact on the use of passenger vehicles, boats, planes, and tractor trailers that are primarily used to smuggle drugs.Lie 5: We need a new wall. There are over 650 miles of existing border barriers. A report by the Government Accountability Office found that Trump’s ill-conceived wall plan would waste billions of dollars and might “cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected.”Congress has already approved almost $2 billion to fortify existing border barriers since 2017, and border communities and local officials have protested Trump’s plans for a 1,000-mile long wall.It is also unlikely that new barriers will reduce migration, the project’s purported aim: A recent study by Stanford and Dartmouth economists found that the addition of hundreds of miles of border barriers as a result of the 2006 Secure Fence Act barely had any effect on migration. Our recent report, “Death, Damage, and Failure,” details the harms resulting from border walls. The name sums up how destructive and unnecessary Trump’s wall is: We can't let him and his administration lie and extort their way to building any of it.Members of Congress know that neither the facts nor the public are on his side. A majority of Americans are opposed to Trump’s border wall follies, including his disgraceful and futile push to use a government shutdown to force Congress into giving him billions of dollars in new wall funding.Congress should continue to reject demands for wasteful border wall funds and instead vote on pending bipartisan measures to reopen the government.