RIO GRANDE CITY — The Texas General Land Office filed a lawsuit Wednesday morning against the Biden administration over unused congressionally appropriated funds for border wall construction.
Land Commissioner George P. Bush, who recently launched a bid for Texas Attorney General, made the announcement Wednesday morning on a 3,100-acre property in Starr County, where a portion of the border wall was left unfinished.
“As you can see behind me, parts of the wall remain unfinished and lying horizontally without any future of being constructed. This is wrong. It’s illegal and it’s unconstitutional,” Bush said.
Some slats still lay on the ground close to the nearly 1-mile wall constructed under the Trump administration and halted by the Biden administration.
The lawsuit is specific to the 3,100-acre property and focused on the president’s power to divert funds previously allocated by Congress.
The complaint filed with the Southern District of Texas stated, “this lawsuit is not about whether border walls are effective. It is about whether a President may unilaterally override these duly enacted appropriations bills to fulfill a campaign promise.”
Bush’s office is asking the court to enjoin the Department of Homeland Security from stopping work on border wall contracts or the allocation of funds, specifically for the project on the Starr County property.
The commissioner said the increase in migrants crossing through the border on the state-owned property leased privately to a farmer, identified as Mr. Wilkins, caused damage to crops and equipment, and revenues collected for the Texas’s Permanent School Fund.
“Unfortunately, because of the skyrocketing amount of illegal immigration which includes human trafficking and drug smugglers that have placed pressure on Mr. Wilkins business, we’ve seen a detrimental value to the leasing of this land,” Bush said.
The General Land Office manages about 200,000 acres near or at the border where they believe a rise in immigration contributes to a loss of revenue.
“We’re proud of the fact that we generate on average about a billion dollars a year for public schools in Texas, but that’s being affected by the illegal immigration crisis,” Bush said.
Questions about the legality of the Biden administration’s decision to divert funds were raised when the president made the announcement at the beginning of his term in office.
Last month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office investigated whether the decision violated the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and found the pause ordered by the president constituted programmatic delays not impoundments.
The GAO looked at existing projects funded by 2018-20 appropriations and found DHS would be engaging in the “standard environmental planning and compliance process,” which will include remediating or mitigating environmental damage caused by construction.
“The Secretary of Homeland Security is considering rescinding or revising previously issued waivers of environmental and other laws, but DHS will engage in the standard compliance process, regardless of whether a previously issued waiver is in place,” the report stated.
The complaint filed Monday seeks declaratory and injunctive relief.
“If we’re successful on those grounds, basically it would compel the federal government to spend those dollars, and at minimum would require the president to not divert those appropriated dollars to other sources other than specific intent by which the law required those dollars to be spent,” Bush explained.
The land commissioner’s lawsuit follows fellow Republicans’ attempts to undermine the Biden administration’s border policies, most notably Gov. Greg Abbott’s border disaster declaration which aims to continue construction of the border wall in the state.
Bush said he could not share information about the governor’s plans to build the wall, but his office will be making their 20,000 state-owned border acres available to his plans.
“We know through our relationships over at the Texas Facilities Commission that they are beginning to interview a lot of the same companies that were constructing the wall on a prior basis,” Bush added.
