(Washington, D.C.) A federal court has ruled that the Biden administration must comply with an order issued in May related to border wall funding. Multiple news outlets reported the order halted the administration from selling border wall materials.
The four-page order issued by a federal judge in south Texas restrains the federal government from implementing a July 2022 Amended Plan and from obligating funds designated by Congress for border wall construction for other purposes.
The ruling was issued in response to an amended complaint filed by Texas and Missouri in a lawsuit they filed in 2021, which they won in May. They filed the complaint earlier this month after news reports claimed the Biden administration was “rushing to sell border wall materials” before President-elect Donald Trump took office. News reports also claimed high-quality, state-of-the-art materials were being sold for pennies on the dollar.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claims the ruling prevents the administration from “disposing of any further border wall materials over the next 30 days – allowing President Trump to use those materials as he sees fit. This will be adopted as an order of the court, making it enforceable if any violations occur.”
Paxton’s office also requested documentation from the administration that it hadn’t violated the May injunction related to spending border wall construction funds for other purposes.
“We have successfully blocked the Biden Administration from disposing of any further border wall materials before President Trump takes office,” Paxton said, claiming the auctioning of materials was “clearly motivated by a desire to thwart President-elect Trump’s immigration agenda.”
The ruling applies to federal sales, not private ones, and likely won’t impact the materials listed on a private auction site that prompted the court filing.
The materials in question had already been sold by the federal government to a private auction site under the National Defense Authorization Act. The Department of Defense confirmed that the border wall materials were redistributed according to the NDAA, which Congress passed with Republican support. The law required the Secretary of Defense to submit detailed information to Congress about how it was using, donating or selling excess border wall materials purchased between fiscal years 2017 through 2022, KGW8 News reported.
Because the materials no longer belong to the federal government, it has “no legal authority to recall the material or stop further resale of material it no longer owns,” the official said, KGW8 News reported.
Texas has not purchased the materials and doesn’t have plans to purchase them, the officials said.
“The ones being listed are scrap. We don’t want them. They are faulty panels, incomplete. The ones we want, the good ones, aren’t listed for auction,” one official said.
Before any federal materials are listed by a private auction, they are first listed on federal auction websites, one Texas-based official told The Center Square. “Every company that uses steel tracks these sales. The panels being sold at auction, no one wants them. No one wants scrap metal. We can’t use them to build the wall.”
“I understand the narrative that people are pushing against the Biden administration to make it seem like they are trying to prevent the Trump administration from putting up border wall but it’s a faulty narrative. Those materials won’t do us any good. We can’t use them. We’re not in the scrap metal business. It makes a good story but it’s not accurate,” the source added.
Sources also explained that if the materials in question were structurally sound, Texas would have already purchased them to build its own border wall.
Usable and structurally sound border wall panels are still lying on the ground in the Rio Grande Valley, for example, one source involved in border wall construction told The Center Square. “The materials we want are still sitting on the ground. The ones being shown online don’t pass a stress test,” the official said.
“There are completed panels in the Rio Grande Valley that fill two city blocks laying on the ground. They reach 15-feet-high stacked flat. These are not for sale. We would take those,” the official said.
