House Democrats Take First Step to Thwart Trump Emergency Decree

2/22/2019 – Bloomberg

(U.S. Air National Guard)

By Anna Edgerton and Billy House

Democrats in the U.S. House filed a resolution on Friday seeking to block President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration to build a wall on the southern U.S. border.

The Democratic-led House will consider a resolution to disapprove of the emergency declaration quickly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said, and it will be sent over to the Senate as a privileged resolution, which means it will have to get a vote on the Senate floor within 18 days of House passage.

The resolution is the opening salvo in the next phase of conflict between a Republican president and Democrats who capitalized on Trump’s unpopularity to take back the House last November. While Democrats have expressed the desire to get started on their policy agenda, they have also been eager to act as a check on Trump.

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U.S. judge weighs expanding lawsuit over family separations to cover more children

2/22/2019 – Reuters

(REUTERS/Jose Luis Gonzalez)

By Kristina Cooke

(Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Thursday appeared open to ordering the government to find potentially thousands of additional children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, which could greatly expand the scope of a lawsuit challenging the separations.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego called a January report by an internal government watchdog that found the U.S. government had started implementing its policy of separating families months before it was announced “a very significant event.”

The Office of Inspector General at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a report published earlier this year that the agency had identified many more children in addition to the 2,737 included as part of the class action lawsuit challenging family separations brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last year. In response to the lawsuit, Sabraw ordered the families identified through a court process to be reunited with their children.

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Trump Claims His Wall Is Being Built. It’s Just a Replacement of Old Barriers.

2/21/2019 – The New York Times

(US Customs and Border Protection)

By Michael Tackett

The president showcased a video of construction on Twitter, but the work he highlighted was from funds previously allocated to replace damaged fencing.

President Trump has been eager to show progress on construction of his long-promised wall on the border with Mexico. So eager that on Wednesday he sent a tweet showing the building of steel fencing in southern New Mexico with the video sped up to add a sense of both efficiency and urgency.

He retweeted himself on Thursday with the all-caps proclamation “THE WALL IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION RIGHT NOW!”

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House Democrats to File Resolution on Trump’s Border Emergency

2/21/2019 – Bloomberg

Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images

By Billy House

Democrats in the U.S. House plan to file a resolution on Friday seeking to block President Donald Trump’s emergency declaration to build a wall on the southern U.S. border.

Representative Joaquin Castro of Texas outlined plans to introduce the measure in an email circulated to colleagues that was obtained Wednesday by Bloomberg News. The resolution has 92 co-sponsors in the Democratic-controlled House.

The resolution is likely to pass the House and may get enough Republican support to pass the GOP-led Senate. Trump has vowed to veto it.

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Poll: Majority opposes Trump emergency declaration for building border wall

2/20/2019 – Politico

(Evan Vucci/AP Photo)

By Steven Shepard

A majority of voters oppose President Donald Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency along the U.S.-Mexico border for the purpose of letting his administration shift money to build the wall Congress refused to fund, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.

Fewer than four in 10 voters, 39 percent, support Trump’s declaration, the poll shows — fewer than the 51 percent who oppose it. In fact, the percentage of poll respondents who “strongly oppose” Trump’s decision, 41 percent, is greater than the combined share of those who “strongly support” (26 percent) or “somewhat support” (13 percent) the national emergency declaration.

Most Republicans back Trump’s decision, however: 77 percent support the emergency declaration, compared with 18 percent who oppose it. But majorities of Democrats (81 percent) and independents (52 percent) oppose the president’s invoking the emergency provision.

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Border wall, bullet train: California vs. Trump escalates

2/20/2019 – The Washington Post

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Disputes over President Donald Trump’s border wall and California’s bullet train are intensifying the feud between the White House and the nation’s most populous state.

The Trump administration on Tuesday said it plans to cancel or claw back $3.5 billion in federal dollars allocated to California’s high-speed rail project, a move Gov. Gavin Newsom called “political retribution” for the state’s lawsuit against Trump’s declaration of a national emergency. California led a 16-state coalition in filing the suit Monday, challenging Trump’s power to declare an emergency to earn more money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“It’s no coincidence that the Administration’s threat comes 24 hours after California led 16 states in challenging the President’s farcical ‘national emergency,’” Newsom said in a statement. “This is clear political retribution by President Trump, and we won’t sit idly by.”

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Beto’s call to remove part of the wall provokes Trump’s ire

2/20/2019 – Politico

Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images

EL PASO, Texas — The feud between President Donald Trump and Beto O’Rourke over immigration resumed at a distance Tuesday, driving the politics of a border wall further into the 2020 presidential campaign.

After O’Rourke said on MSNBC last week that he would “absolutely” remove an existing stretch of border wall from his hometown of El Paso, Trump told reporters in Washington on Tuesday that the statement marked “probably the end of his political career.”

The opposite of that assessment appeared to be true nearly 2,000 miles away in the border town of El Paso, where O’Rourke did not announce his run for president on Tuesday — but might as well have.

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