Texas Judge Blocks Border Barrier Funding
An interesting take on standing, to say the least
By Andrew R. Arthur on October 16, 2019
Senior Judge David Briones of the of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, El Paso Division, issued a Memorandum Opinion last week in which he found that a "Presidential Proclamation on Declaring a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States" violated the 2019 Consolidated Appropriations Act (2019 CAA). Having made this finding, he directed the plaintiffs (described below) to file a proposed preliminary injunction to address that violation. The section of that order in which he found that the plaintiffs have standing is interesting, to say the least.
I will first note that the link above to that decision is from Law360, which is behind a paywall. The Western District of Texas has a page for "Notable Cases", which states that "No cases are currently posted." They should not be so modest.
The plaintiffs in the case are El Paso County, Texas, and Border Network for Human Rights (BNHR). You may have thought the issue was settled when the Supreme Court in July granted the government's request for a stay of an injunction in Trump v. Sierra Club. That case involved the same proclamation, which authorized the use of funds by the Department of Defense (DOD) to erect border barriers to staunch the flow of drugs into the United States. Where there is a district court judge, however, there is a way to stymie the Trump administration's immigration initiatives.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Texas-Judge-Blocks-Border-Barrier-Funding