By Shannon Bream, Bill Mears | Fox News
The Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote has denied a request to
halt construction of President
Trump’s border wall over environmental concerns.
A number of groups, including the ACLU and Sierra Club,
had asked the high court to get involved again after the justices last year
cleared the way for the administration to use military funds for construction while
the case played out in the courts.
A federal appeals court had ruled against the
administration last month, but the justices, for now, have given another
temporary victory to the administration.
"The fight continues,” said Dror Ladin, a staff
attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “Every lower court to
consider the question has ruled President Trump's border wall illegal, and the
Supreme Court’s temporary order does not decide the case. We’ll be back before
the Supreme Court soon to put a stop to Trump’s xenophobic border wall once and
for all.”
The four liberal justices dissented from Friday’s order.
In June, the Supreme Court also declined to hear an
appeal from a coalition of environmental groups that pushed back
against the Trump administration's construction of the wall along
the U.S.-Mexico border.
The groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity,
challenged a 1996 law giving the president authority to fight illegal
immigration and border crossings, and limiting some legal challenges.
The coalition claimed that the Trump administration did
not conduct sufficient environmental impact studies for the construction and that
endangered species like the jaguar and Mexican wolf would be adversely affected
by the barrier.
They had asserted in their case that the law’s allowance
for the secretary of Homeland Security to waive any laws necessary to allow the
quick construction of border fencing violates the Constitution’s separation of
powers. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had dismissed the case, citing a
prior case from 2007 with "a nearly identical context."
"This Court finds that precedent persuasive, and it
compels the conclusion that Plaintiffs' complaint fails to state plausible
constitutional claims as a matter of law," the Circuit Court's ruling
said.
Fox News' Alex Pappas, Ronn Blitzer and The
Associated Press contributed to this report.
