Trump administration asks court for emergency approval to proceed with border wall

The Justice Department is pressing a federal appeals court for an emergency stay that would allow President Donald Trump to move forward with construction of two key stretches of border wall in Arizona and Texas. In a filing late Monday night California time, Justice Department attorneys said the preliminary injunction issued last month by a federal judge in Oakland threatens to derail the construction by delaying the projects past the end of the fiscal year in September. “The injunction threatens to permanently deprive [the Department of Defense] of its authorization to use the funds at issue to complete the El Paso and Yuma projects, because the funding will likely lapse during the appeal’s pendency,” Justice Department lawyers said in the motion filed with the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam granted the injunction on May 24, saying that the administration’s immediate plan to tap $1 billion in counterdrug funding for the border wall amounted to an unauthorized expenditure of government funds because it was not tied to an unforeseen emergency...MORE