President Trump this week expressed confidence that he would prevail against a lawsuit filed by 16 U.S. states seeking to block his declaration of a national emergency to fund a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.
The states that joined forces for the lawsuit include California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and Michigan.
The group of states has charged President Trump and top officials in his administration with taking away taxpayer funds for their communities to fulfill a promise from his 2016 campaign to curb illegal immigration and the flow of drugs. The states said Trump’s order would cause them to lose millions of dollars in federal funding for National Guard units dealing with counter-drug activities and that redirection of funds from authorized military construction projects would damage their economies.
“I think in the end, we’re going to be very successful with the lawsuit,” President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office and suggesting that he was not concerned or surprised by the states’ legal challenge.
The American Civil Liberties Union also this week filed its own lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in California, alleging that “Trump disregarded the will of Congress with his emergency declaration.”
Legal experts have indicated that challenges to President Trump’s emergency declaration, which critics have called unconstitutional, face an uphill and most likely losing battle in a showdown likely to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.
President Trump’s demand for wall funding triggered a historic 35-day government shutdown that ended in January. Democrats and Republicans later agreed on a deal to avoid another shutdown with $1.4 billion allocated toward border fencing. The president agreed to sign that and then declared a national emergency, redirecting an additional $6.7 billion beyond what lawmakers authorized for the project.
House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the country’s top Democrat, has called a wall “immoral.” This issue is expected to be a flash-point in the 2020 president campaign.
