OZY by Nick Fouriezos 4/16/2020
Exclusive: Trump Ramps Up Border Wall Land Grabs Amid Pandemic Lockdowns
Last month, as President Donald Trump told millions of Americans to stay home in response to the coronavirus, lawyers on the Texas border began noticing a strange trend — a sharp spike in the number of eminent domain cases being sent to the courts.
In just over three months in 2020, the Trump administration has already filed at least 26 new cases in its efforts to acquire land in Texas to build his long-promised Mexico border wall. That’s roughly a third of the 77 total cases issued in the entirety of Trump’s tenure in office, according to data compiled by the Texas Civil Rights Project. Since the start of March, the federal government has filed 16 new cases — encompassing more than 1,000 acres of land — even as Trump was announcing social distancing guidelines and governments shut down many nonessential services.
That’s sparking concerns among critics of the wall that the Trump administration might be using the nationwide scare of the coronavirus to push through an agenda that might otherwise have faced far greater resistance. Many defendants are going unrepresented in courts, say lawyers.
“They are trying to take advantage of the pandemic, when lawyers are not going to be as willing to take cases and many people are sheltering in places,†says Ricky Garza, a staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, whose lawyers are fighting some of the administration’s eminent domain cases in court. Meanwhile, property owners whose land Uncle Sam is seizing are having to decide whether to show up in court and risk contracting the virus or not coming and waiving many of their legal rights. “They are asking our clients to make an impossible choice: between their health and defending their homes,†Garza says.
More:
https://www.ozy.com/news-and-politics/trump-ramps-up-border-wall-land-grabs-amid-pandemic-lockdowns/309145/
