Arizona AG Sues Biden Administration For Failing To Consider Environmental Impact Of NOT Building Wall

Litigation by troll.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Pity the poor mud turtle! However will it survive without a thirty foot metal wall planted in the middle of the Sonoran Desert? Why didn’t Joe Biden think about the little animals deprived of their natural habitat when he cruelly halted the construction of the wall on our Mexican border? That’s what Arizona’s Attorney General Mark Brnovich wants to know!

Arizona’s top lawyer is literally suing the Biden administration for failing to conduct an environmental assessment before halting construction of the border wall, arguing that it violates the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA).

“Defendants have embarked on multiple environmentally disruptive policies without performing even cursory environmental analysis,” huffs the complaint filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Arizona.

According to AG Brnovich, the gaps in the barrier “fragment[] the habitat of wildlife that lives in the U.S.-Mexico border region. And it does so in a manner that is completely arbitrary, unplanned, and unstudied under NEPA.”

Worse still, failing to build the wall, along with the cancellation of the “Remain in Mexico” policy may lead to more people living in America. And because courts have ruled that construction projects which will lead to population growth in a specific area require an environmental impact evaluation, Arizona would like to force an assessment because some unknown number of people might move to the state if they don’t get immediately deported or blocked from entry and parked in a dangerous refugee camp in Matamoros.

Migrants (like everyone else) need housing, infrastructure, hospitals, and schools. They drive cars, purchase goods, and use public parks and other facilities. Their actions also directly result in the release of pollutants, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which directly affects air quality. All of these activities have significant environment impact which, as discussed above, courts have recognized as cognizable impacts under NEPA.

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The case is batshit, not least because Homeland Security Secretary Alejandra Mayorkas, a named Defendant in this suit, has the statutory authority to waive NEPA and the Endangered Species Act in the border area, as confirmed in 2019 by the Ninth Circuit.

Maybe Mark Brnovich, who appears to be gearing up for his 2022 reelection campaign with a state-sponsored killing spree, hopes that he’ll get a better result than the environmental plaintiffs who tried to use NEPA to halt border wall construction. Indeed, President Trump recently installed the AG’s wife Susan Brnovich on the Arizona federal bench, and the case has been assigned to 44-year-old Judge Dominic Lanza, another Trump appointee.

Or perhaps Brnovich is simply trolling. But he’ll have to get up earlier in the morning if he wants to be the biggest troll on the border block. Freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn has beaten him to the punch with a proposed bill to designate the Southern border wall as a national monument as a “first step toward finishing the wall.”

He’s calling it the “Donument Act.” Get it?

HEH.

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Arizona v. Mayorkas (2:21-cv-00617)


Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.