ACLU sues Trump for national emergency on border wall

February 20, 2019, 00:08 GMT

By Dartunorro Clark

The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump's national emergency declaration for the construction of his long-promised border wall and his ability to use taxpayers' money from other budgets to finance the construction.

"The president is using a misrepresentation of non-existent urgency to undermine our constitutional system of checks and balances," said Cecillia Wang, deputy legal director of the ACLU. "We are taking legal action to prevent the administration from continuing this blatantly illegal attempt to steal taxpayers' money for a border wall that, according to Congress, security experts and Americans, is useless and harmful. "

The civil rights group filed a lawsuit in federal court in the Northern District of California. The Sierra Club, a California-based environmental group, is the Crown's main client, alongside residents and community organizations living and working along the border.

The ruling came after 16 states hired Monday a similar lawsuit in the same court Monday against the president 's urgent declaration. This lawsuit was led by California and also included Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Virginia.

The ACLU plans to argue that by issuing the emergency declaration to build the wall and using money from other federal agencies to build it, Trump usurps the authority of the Congress, which has adopted a bipartite spending program that the president signed last week. include funds for its proposed wall.

At the announcement of the emergency last week, Trump had announced his intention to take action, particularly before the 9th US Federal Court of Appeal, which hears the affairs of the North District of the United States. California and has frequently fanned his anger because of his decisions against several policies of the administration.

"We will have a national emergency and then we will be sued," Trump said. "And they will sue us in the 9th circuit, even though it should not be there, and we will eventually have a bad decision, then we will have another bad decision, and then we will end up in the Supreme Court." Court, and then we hope that we will get a fair shake, and we will win before the Supreme Court, just like the ban, "a reference to his government's ban on traveling from several Muslim-majority countries, what the High Court upheld last summer.