President Donald Trump’s deputies are filing a blizzard of lawsuits to help fill small gaps in the border wall that are being held open by Texas landowners, according to the New York Times.
The paper reported on October 29:
With the president’s deadline nearing, the government has stepped up litigation against landowners in South Texas. It has filed 106 lawsuits against landowners this year to survey, seize, and potentially begin construction, an increase from 27 lawsuits filed in 2019, said Ricky Garza, a staff lawyer for the Texas Civil Rights Project. The federal government filed 22 cases in September alone.
Most of the federal lawsuits are successful because federal law allows the border agencies broad authority to buy land and bypass environmental regulations.
So far, aided by Democrats in Congress, the resistance has preserved numerous gaps in southern Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. The gaps providing room for allied cartels and coyotes to deliver many migrants to U.S employers and progressives. For example, the San Antonio Current reported on October 14:
A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration’s work to build its border wall through a South Texas butterfly sanctuary violates the property rights of the conservationists who run it.
In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit revived the National Butterfly Center’s challenge to the White House’s authority to build the wall through its 100-acre sanctuary near the town of Mission.
…
“The due process claim survives because the government has not established that its statutory authority to enter private property to patrol the border licenses all of the alleged intrusions at the Center,” U.S. Circuit Judge Nina Pillard wrote.
The court denied two of three legal claims by the butterfly sanctuary but directed a lower court to decide the third Fifth Amendment claim.
The massive resistance has had a broad impact, even though officials have built 400 miles of Trump’s border wall. For example, the agency officials who are building Trump’s wall have built many miles on lower-priority, little-trafficked border areas while waiting for legal approval to fill in gaps in southern Texas. The NYT report noted:
Chief Rodney S. Scott of Border Patrol conceded that the Rio Grande Valley “was higher priority for the U.S. Border Patrol.” But, he added, “we elected to go ahead and shift down to a lower priority because I could make a difference there and then.”
Trump’s border wall and various regulatory changes have proved to be boon for working-class Americans by dramatically shrinking the flow of economic migrants into American workplaces and rental marketplaces. In 2019, for example, 400,000 migrants used regulatory loopholes, such as catch and release rules, to break into the U.S. labor market. That number fell to just 16,000 in the 12 months up to October 2020.
Democrats, business groups, and their allied elite-left progressives are trying to reopen the migrant flow into U.S. workplaces.
Joe Biden’s 2020 plan promises to “reassert America’s commitment to asylum-seekers and refugees,” wipe out Trump’s asylum reforms, bar any deportations for 100 days, and end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony.
Biden also wants to let companies import more visa workers, let mayors import temporary workers, and allow an unlimited flow of foreign graduates through U.S. universities into white-collar jobs. Biden would “exempt from any cap [the] recent graduates of Ph.D. programs in STEM fields.”
Biden also wants to accelerate the inflow of chain migration migrants and dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.
“The influx of low wage workers from all across the world will drive down incomes, drive down wages, deplete the middle class, bankrupt Social Security, bankrupt Medicare, bankrupt Medicaid, bankrupt federal entitlements, overcrowd schools, and overcrowd every hospital in the middle of a pandemic,” White House aide Stephen Miller told reporters on October 28.
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