The Entire D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Will Review Case – Including the ACLJ’s Amicus Brief – Regarding the President’s Efforts to Secure Our Border

By 

Jordan Sekulow

|
March 24, 2020

4 min read

National Security

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Time after time, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and her extreme-left colleagues in Congress have refused to do their job by addressing the situation at our southern border.

In fact, as we told you before, doing just the opposite Speaker Pelosi has led an effort to block President Trump from securing the border and protecting Americans.

We have been supporting the President’s well-reasoned border security efforts, filing amicus briefs in several of these cases; and thankfully, thus far, commonsense and the Constitution have prevailed. We’ve now seen the President’s policies make a marked reduction in illegal crossings.

Yet, even in the face of this success for our national security, Speaker Pelosi will not back down, and has appealed the trial court’s decision allowing the President’s actions to be implemented.

Now the entire D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear the case we filed a critical amicus brief in to determine whether President Trump can use federal funds to defend our national security.

We told you how Speaker Pelosi and the House of Representatives filed a lawsuit and sought a preliminary injunction to stop the Trump Administration from utilizing and transferring funds to secure the border via an appropriations statute, 10 U.S.C. § 284(b)(7), a transfer provision, § 8005 of the 2019 Department of Defense Appropriations Act, and also separate funds pursuant to 10 U.S.C. § 2808, a statute identified by the President in his National Emergencies Act declaration.

The ACLJ filed our brief in support of the President and his Administration’s efforts to end to the humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border and protect the safety of American citizens.

We argued that the Speaker Pelosi-led House lacked the legal right to sue – to challenge the Trump Administration’s usage of congressionally enacted funding statutes.

We also maintained that it was improper for the U.S. House – just because it doesn’t like the President’s policy – to demand a court’s intervention to change the rules in a political dispute between two branches of government. This is especially so when Speaker Pelosi’s House is but one chamber of a bicameral branch.

In other words, Congress passed the laws and appropriated the funds. The President was well within his rights to use those funds according to the constraints imposed by Congress. Because of constitutional separation of powers principles, a court should not take sides in a case like this.

We filed our amicus (“friend of the court”) brief before a 3-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. The panel heard oral arguments in the case last month.

Now, the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has recently entered an order that it will rehear the case en banc. This means that even before the 3-judge panel decided the case, the entire D.C. Circuit – all the judges, not just 3 – determined that the case should be heard by the full court. The court ordered all amici curiae – that’s us – to submit 30 additional copies of our brief to the court by March 26. We are doing just that.

Now our brief supporting President Trump’s efforts to secure our border will be reviewed by the entire D.C. circuit.

The situation at the border is real and only has been reduced by the very actions that are challenged. If they are struck down, it could go right back to the burgeoning crisis it was just a few short months ago.

Even the former Homeland Security Secretary under President Obama, Jeh Johnson, told Fox Business that what we have at our southern border is a crisis.

“By any measure 4,000 apprehensions on our southern border in one day, 100,000 in a month, is a crisis . . . . It’s a crisis in that it overwhelms our border security personnel to deal with that volume of people coming in and it’s a crisis in these communities on the border that have to absorb these populations.”

Our border patrol is already overwhelmed. If these Executive actions are undone, our nation’s safety could be in jeopardy. The borders must be secured.

The ACLJ will continue to defend our government’s efforts to do just that.

You can stand with us, too, and make your voice be heard. Join our briefs. Sign our Petition to Secure the Border today.