Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow Big Bend border wall construction

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to clear the way for border wall construction to resume around Texas’s Big Bend region. 

Solicitor General D. John Sauer called a lower judge’s block on the construction “baseless” and said it disrupts the government’s ability to secure a quarter of the southern border. 

“Such judicial usurpation of Congress’s commands and the Secretary’s authority amply warrants a stay,” he wrote to the court. 

Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem waived environmental laws earlier this year to expedite the construction of barriers and roads across the Big Bend sector. 

The administration has said it will not build a large border wall inside Big Bend National Park but is pursuing other construction activity there. It does still appear to be planning wall construction in other parts of the region, which sits along the bend of the Rio Grande. 

The administration wants the Supreme Court to lift a ruling from U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, who blocked the project earlier this month in response to a lawsuit filed by a preservation group, a recreation guide and the Center for Biological Diversity. 

Cardone, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, found the construction is sizable enough where it requires clear congressional authorization.  

The Trump administration points to a federal immigration law allowing border construction “to deter illegal crossings in areas of high illegal entry.”  But the judge wrote that “if the Big Bend Sector is an area of high illegal entry, so is every other sector, and the waiver authority would apply to the entire U.S.-Mexico border.” 

The administration has regularly turned to the Supreme Court for emergency relief after a judge has blocked an aspect of the president’s agenda, and the justices have sided with the president more often than not. 

However, it hasn’t been a clean sweep. Earlier on Wednesday, the court refused to revive the administration’s restrictions for transgender inmates.

Sauer’s latest request asks the justices to also go a step further. In addition to granting emergency relief, which would technically be an interim decision, he wants them to completely overrule the judge’s decision, without waiting for the case to one day return to their normal docket. 

“Those errors are so obvious that this Court can swiftly correct them on the merits without further briefing or oral argument,” Sauer wrote.