Tag: Border Wall

by Kevin Daley   A federal judge in California barred the Trump administration Friday night from reallocating $2.5 billion to construct border barriers. U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam, an Obama appointee, expanded an earlier order and forbade the government from moving forward with specific border wall projects in Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. He also turned the previous order into a permanent injunction. “Congress considered all of defendants’ proffered needs for border barrier construction, weighed the public interest in such construction against defendants’ request for taxpayer money, and struck what it considered to be the proper balance — in the public’s interest — by making available only $1.375 billion in funding, which was for certain border barrier construction not at issue here,” Gilliam’s order reads. Elsewhere in his decision, Gilliam said government lawyers were advancing “an argument that the court should not enjoin conduct found to be unlawful because the ends justify the means. No case supports this principle.” After declaring a national emergency at the southern border, the administration announced it would reprogram the administration will reprogram $600 million from the Treasury Department’s forfeiture fund, $2.5 billion from Defense Department counter-narcotics activities, and $3.6 billion from military construction…

by Rachel del Guidice   COOLIDGE, Arizona—The vice president of a family-owned construction company says his firm is competing for one of the nation’s most talked-about contracts because its leaders believe they can do what many say can’t be done. “Two years ago, when the president said he wanted to build a wall [from] sea to sea … many people said, ‘It cannot be built, it won’t be built,’” Grant Fisher, vice president of Fisher Industries, told The Daily Signal in an interview. But “build the impossible,” Fisher said, is “what we do.” Fisher said his company’s $3.3 billion proposal to the Department of Homeland Security is to construct 218 miles of border fence, plus roads and related technology, by June 2020. The work would be in 11 sectors, ranging from 2 miles near Tucson, Arizona, to 46 miles near El Paso, Texas, according to the proposal. The fence would use bollards, which are upright steel posts usually placed along roads and parking lots to block or control traffic. Fisher said his family’s company, established in the ’60s, found a solution allowing construction of a mile of steel fence per day along the southern border. “This system includes the physical…