US Supreme Court allows border wall in Big Bend National Park to proceed

What the report says

The US Supreme Court has let President Donald Trump’s administration move ahead with construction of a border wall through a remote part of Big Bend National Park in West Texas, according to Al Jazeera and Reuters. The court granted an emergency request from the government to lift a lower-court injunction that had temporarily halted the project while the legal challenge continued.

The case was brought by environmental and local plaintiffs, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Ruidosa Church, a river guide and a landowner. They argued that the government had used waiver authority to speed up border work and avoid environmental and historic-preservation protections. A federal judge had previously blocked the construction, pointing to the relatively small share of migrant apprehensions in the Big Bend sector compared with its share of the US-Mexico border.

In allowing the project to proceed, the Supreme Court said the government was likely to succeed in its argument that the lower court lacked jurisdiction under a 1996 immigration law that limits judicial review of border-barrier disputes. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only justice noted as disagreeing with the emergency ruling. The decision matters because it removes a major legal obstacle to a project critics say could affect a sensitive park landscape and supporters frame as part of border-security enforcement.