1、CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress Legal SidebarLegal Sidebari i The Texas Border Barrier Litigation: Implications for Appropriations Law January 24, 2020 A little-noted rule of appropriations law and an obscure provision of Congresss annual appropriations acts have as
2、sumed prominent roles in the Trump Administrations effort to accelerate border-barrier construction using Department of Defense (DOD) funding. In December 2019, Judge David Briones, U.S. District Judge for the Western District of Texas at El Paso, entered an injunction in El Paso County v. Trump, ba
3、rring DOD from using military construction appropriations “beyond the $1.375 billion” expressly appropriated to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 Consolidated Appropriations Act (CAA) “for border wall construction.” Judge Briones reasoned that Congresss specific limit
4、on funds available to CBP for a border wall precluded use of more general DOD appropriations, and that an appropriations rider barred DOD from funding a border wall using authority outside of an appropriations act. While a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (Fifth Circu
