President Donald Trump slammed a lawsuit filed by 16 states, including California and New York, saying it was propelled mostly by radicals on the left.
Trump took to Twitter on Feb. 19 to share his thoughts on the lawsuit.
“As I predicted, 16 states, led mostly by Open Border Democrats and the Radical Left, have filed a lawsuit in, of course, the 9th Circuit! California, the state that has wasted billions of dollars on their out of control Fast Train, with no hope of completion, seems in charge!” he said.
Trump added on Tuesday, “The failed Fast Train project in California, where the cost overruns are becoming world record setting, is hundreds of times more expensive than the desperately needed Wall!”
The emergency declaration, combined with the spending bill, would give the administration $8 billion for the wall, the president said. That included $6.1 billion shifted from the military budget.
The president said in a press conference that drugs, gangs, and illegal aliens are pouring into the country, necessitating the need to declare a national emergency.
“We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border and we’re going to do it one way or the other. We have to do it,” Trump said at the White House. “We have tremendous amounts of drugs flowing into our country, much of it coming from the southern border.”
He also said he knew legal challenges would be filed against his declaration but noted that even if lower courts ruled against him, the Supreme Court would uphold his authority.
The nonprofit claims in the legal complaint that its “members’ ability to observe wildlife will be impaired by the construction of a border wall and the resulting destruction of critical habitat.”
State of CA Et Al. vs Trump... by on Scribd
Besides New York and California, the following states joined in the suit: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and Virginia.
The states argued that “the federal government’s own data prove there is no national emergency at the southern border that warrants construction of a wall.”
The states also said in the lawsuit that the declaration, if it stands, would divert money from the states and “cause damage to their economies” and, in the case of California and New Mexico, would cause “irreparable environmental damage” to the states’ natural resources where the wall is built.