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Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt believes the crisis at the southern border is a "completely avoidable problem," as the state teams up with Texas to seek a preliminary injunction to make the Biden administration resume construction of the wall.
"I think there's a real sense of urgency here," Schmitt told Fox News in an interview Tuesday. "You see record numbers of border crossings, the situation is just completely out of control."
MISSOURI, TEXAS SUE BIDEN ADMIN IN AIM TO RESUME CONSTRUCTION OF BORDER WALL
Schmitt, along with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed the lawsuit last month, arguing that the administration's halting of the wall's construction when President Biden took office in January redirected funds appropriated for the project, and in doing so violated the separation of powers and the Take Care clause of the Constitution.
The Trump-era border wall remains unfinished after the Biden administration put a stop to it. (Fox News)
This week, the states are seeking a preliminary injunction to get an immediate ruling that would force the Biden administration to begin spending the $3.8 billion appropriated by Congress to the wall project -- which began under the Trump administration but was halted once Biden came into office.
The lawsuit references to the crisis at the southern border, where there have been hundreds of thousands of migrant encounters in recent months and more than 1.7 million in Fiscal Year 2020 and ties it to the canceling of border wall contracts.
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"Central to the federal government’s immigration failures has been the Biden Administration’s refusal to spend funds appropriated by Congress mandating the construction of a wall along the southwest border, and the Department of Homeland Security’s recent termination of contracts to perform work on construction projects to build the wall," the request for an injunction states.
The filing cites statements from the Department of Homeland Security in 2018 and 2020 that wall construction had helped significantly reduce border crossings -- including in Yuma Sector where illegal entries with new wall construction saw a more than 87% decrease between FY 2019 and FY 2020.
"This is a completely avoidable problem and it lays completely at the feet of Joe Biden," Schmitt said. "This is his crisis but if he's not going to follow the law, we’re going to go to court and make sure he follows the law."
Missouri and Texas are pushing this lawsuit months after securing of the most significant immigration-related rulings for Republicans earlier this year. A federal judge backed the states’ lawsuit against the administration over the ending of the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) -- a Trump-era policy which kept migrants in Mexico while they had their hearings.
The federal court ordered the re-implementation of the program, a ruling that was upheld by the Supreme Court. The Biden administration is still trying to end the policy in compliance with the court ruling, but in the meantime has stated it is re-implementing the policy as ordered -- with tent courts being rebuilt along the border.
Schmitt is similarly optimistic about this case, arguing that the executive doesn’t have the ability to do what the Biden administration did in terms of the wall funding.
"It violates the Constitution," he said. "Within our system of separation of powers, this is a congressional action, they appropriated the money. The president doesn’t have, and the agency doesn't have, unilateral authority to refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress due to policy objections."
Republican lawmakers and attorneys general have launched a number of efforts to attempt to reverse what they see as policies by the Biden administration that have worsened the crisis at the southern border. The Biden administration has instead blamed the Trump administration’s closing off of legal asylum pathways, as well as pointing to "root causes" like poverty and corruption in Central America.
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Schmitt said that the border wall lawsuit is unlikely to be the last legal effort against the Biden administration by his office.
"We are going to continue to file lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit as long as Joe Biden is engaged in this unlawful activity, as long as he is ignoring the Constitution, as long as he is making things up as he goes along," he said. "This is a country where we respect the rule of law and we’re going to hold his feet to the fire on it and continue to file these lawsuits."
Fox News' Breck Dumas contributed to this report.
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