The Supreme Court on July 26 reversed a lower court decision that blocked President Trump from using $2.5 billion from military accounts to build a portion of his pledged border wall [11]. The order lifts an injunction from a federal judge in a case brought by the Sierra Club [12] and the Southern Border Communities Coalition [13] challenging Trump's February declaration of a national emergency to access more than $8 billion to build the wall. US District Judge Haywood Gilliam in Northern California issued the permanent injunction blocking the administration from accessing $2.5 billion in diverted military funds, finding that construction would cause "irreparable harm" to the challengers' interests at the border. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month declined to lift that injunction. The Supreme Court's conservative majority found that the administration had "made a sufficient showing at this stage" that the challengers do not have standing to block the diversion of the funds.
The case concerns $2.5 billion the administration says will be used to used to build more than 100 miles of fencing. One project would replace 46 miles of barrier in New Mexico for $789 million. Another would replace 63 miles in Arizona for $646 million. The case remains pending before the Nonth Circuit. (Courthouse News Service [14], AP [15], Reuters [16], The Hill [17])