The Supreme Court gave an OK on Monday to the Trump administration to start building border wall in Texas’ Big Bend area, including through the rugged national park, setting aside a lower court’s blockade.
In an unsigned opinion, the justices said courts have scant powers to review Homeland Security’s decision to waive environmental and historic preservation laws to speed construction. That means the lower court should have stayed out of the Big Bend dispute, the justices said.
“The government is exceedingly likely to prevail on its argument that the district court lacked jurisdiction to adjudicate respondents’ so-called major-questions-doctrine claim,” the justices said.
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The ruling will allow President Trump to move forward with nearly 300 miles of wall in western Texas, which the Border Patrol labels the Big Bend sector. That includes the eponymous national park.
Those miles are part of President Trump’s second-term push to finish the border wall, the most visible promise from his first campaign in 2016.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone, a George W. Bush appointee to the court in western Texas, had issued the order halting work early last month.
She said the 1996 law allowing waivers only applies to areas of the border seeing “high illegal entry” by migrants.
She said the Big Bend sector has traditionally been the calmest part of the border, so waivers shouldn’t apply there.
She acknowledged some confusing language in the law, but said under the “Major Questions Doctrine,” in times when Congress isn’t specific enough in its grant of powers to the executive branch, courts must rule against the administration.
Among the laws DHS has waived to allow construction are the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
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