A federal judge has shot down the Biden administration’s plans to divert money from border wall construction to other projects like environmental remediation, ruling that it appears to violate the law.
Judge Drew B. Tipton said Congress gets to decide how money is spent and when it wrote its spending bills for fiscal years 2020 and 2021 it allocated nearly $1.4 billion each year for wall-building. The president trampled on that when he decided to spend wall-building money on “remediation projects.”
The government said it should have leeway to spend the money, and argued the remediation projects were ancillary to the wall and should be allowed.
Judge Tipton, though, said the way Congress wrote the law it was quite specific in saying the money should go to barriers along the border.
“The central question in this case, then, is this: Has the Government obligated FY 2020 and FY 2021 funds for the ‘construction of [a] barrier system’? The answer is largely no,” the judge concluded in the opinion he issued Friday.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the plaintiffs challenging Homeland Security, hailed the ruling.
“Biden acted completely improperly by refusing to spend the money that Congress appropriated for border wall construction, and even attempting to redirect those funds,” he said. “His actions demonstrate his desperation for open borders at any cost, but Texas has prevailed.”
The Washington Times has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
The border wall has been a problem for President Biden for years.
Despite voting for wall building while a senator in the Bush administration and serving in the Obama administration that carried out some of that wall-building,” Mr. Biden reversed himself in the 2020 campaign and declared he would put an end to Mr. Trump’s construction.
He issued a pause on his first day in office and repeatedly begged Congress to rescind the billions of dollars it had approved under Mr. Trump but that weren’t yet spent.
Lawmakers refused, leaving the money in the pipeline with an obligation that it be spent within five years.
Running up against those deadlines, Mr. Biden sought to use the money for projects other than the actual border barrier.
Among his planned uses were flood control, cleanup and environmental remediation.
Judge Tipton said the government identified just two locations where new wall was being built: A 500-foot gap in Arizona and a structure along the Tijuana River channel in California.
But the rest of the money has been earmarked for illegal purposes, the judge ruled.
As part of its defense the Justice Department had argued to the judge that walls weren’t effective, but the judge said Homeland Security’s own data says they are.
“DHS has even boasted about at least one incident where the physical barrier was ‘very effective’ in stopping ‘a violent mob of 1,000 people’ from entering, many of whom were ultimately apprehended,” the judge wrote.
He put his ruling on hold for seven days to give the Biden administration a chance to appeal.
Judge Tipton, in another ruling Friday, sided with the Biden administration in ruling that states did not have standing to challenge an expansive use of “parole” to bring in migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
That program welcomes up to 30,000 unauthorized migrants a month, as long as they alert Homeland Security they are coming and they fly into airports rather than surge across the southern border.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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