On Friday night, the Supreme Court was split on whether or not to allow the Trump administration to use $2.5 billion in Pentagon funds to build part of the president’s wall along the southern border. The Supreme Court’s conservatives won out and set aside a lower-court ruling for the Sierra Club and a coalition of border communities that said reallocating Defense Department money would violate federal law.
But the groups that are against the wall on the southern border immediately responded to the court’s ruling that the legal battles were not over.
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“This is not over. We will be asking the federal appeals court to expedite the ongoing appeals proceeding to halt the irreversible and imminent damage from Trump’s border wall,” Dror Ladin, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, said in a statement. The ACLU represented the Sierra Club and the coalition. “Our Constitution’s separation of powers will be permanently harmed should Trump get away with pillaging military funds for a xenophobic border wall Congress denied.”
The Supreme Court’s decision is a stay of the injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on a 2-to-1 vote. The administration wants to finalize contracts for the work on the wall before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30, according to The Washington Post.
Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke out against the court’s decision.
“For months, the President has sought to undermine our military readiness and steal from our men and women in uniform to waste billions on a wasteful, ineffective wall that Congress on a bipartisan basis has repeatedly refused to fund. The Supreme Court’s decision tonight to allow President Trump to defy the bipartisan will of the Congress and proceed with contracts to spend billions of dollars on his wall undermines the Constitution and the law,” she said in a statement.
