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Trump Declares National Emergency at the Southern Border
Fox News reports:
President Trump said Friday he is declaring a national emergency on the southern border, tapping into executive powers in a bid to divert billions toward construction of a wall even as he plans to sign a funding package that includes just $1.4 billion for border security. “We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border … one way or the other, we have to do it,” Trump said in the Rose Garden.
The text of the Executive Order declaring a national emergency has been made available at Whitehouse.gov:
Published in GeneralThe current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency. The southern border is a major entry point for criminals, gang members, and illicit narcotics. The problem of large-scale unlawful migration through the southern border is long-standing, and despite the executive branch’s exercise of existing statutory authorities, the situation has worsened in certain respects in recent years. In particular, recent years have seen sharp increases in the number of family units entering and seeking entry to the United States and an inability to provide detention space for many of these aliens while their removal proceedings are pending. If not detained, such aliens are often released into the country and are often difficult to remove from the United States because they fail to appear for hearings, do not comply with orders of removal, or are otherwise difficult to locate. In response to the directive in my April 4, 2018, memorandum and subsequent requests for support by the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense has provided support and resources to the Department of Homeland Security at the southern border. Because of the gravity of the current emergency situation, it is necessary for the Armed Forces to provide additional support to address the crisis.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, DONALD J. TRUMP, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including sections 201 and 301 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), hereby declare that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States, and that section 12302 of title 10, United States Code, is invoked and made available, according to its terms, to the Secretaries of the military departments concerned, subject to the direction of the Secretary of Defense in the case of the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. To provide additional authority to the Department of Defense to support the Federal Government’s response to the emergency at the southern border, I hereby declare that this emergency requires use of the Armed Forces and, in accordance with section 301 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1631), that the construction authority provided in section 2808 of title 10, United States Code, is invoked and made available, according to its terms, to the Secretary of Defense and, at the discretion of the Secretary of Defense, to the Secretaries of the military departments. I hereby direct as follows:
Section 1. The Secretary of Defense, or the Secretary of each relevant military department, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, shall order as many units or members of the Ready Reserve to active duty as the Secretary concerned, in the Secretary’s discretion, determines to be appropriate to assist and support the activities of the Secretary of Homeland Security at the southern border.
Sec. 2. The Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Interior, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and, subject to the discretion of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretaries of the military departments, shall take all appropriate actions, consistent with applicable law, to use or support the use of the authorities herein invoked, including, if necessary, the transfer and acceptance of jurisdiction over border lands.
Sec. 3. This proclamation is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this fifteenth day of February, in the year of our Lord two thousand nineteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-third.
DONALD J. TRUMP
I am not sure this Emergency Action is the right one to take. That said I think you are somewhat misrepresenting the issue of National Emergency. We have a lot of them right now including sanctions of people in Myanmar, 4 people in Burundi and the former President of the Central Africa Republic. None of this is urgent to the point Congress could not deal with it. These things mostly don’t even affect American Citizens at all.
One of the Current National Emergencies was enacted by Carter. It was freezing Iranian assets. Some time since November of 1979 Congress probably had time to deal with this.
Emergency as used in the National Emergencies Act does not really mean “Emergency” the way we use it in normal language. It can actually mean serious concern or longstanding debate.
FYI I updated the post with the text of Trump’s (4th) declaration of national emergency.
So? What does that matter?
This is correct.
At the same time, the previous “national emergencies” all seem extremely different than this one, in that they overwhelmingly involve taking sanctions against specific foreign nationals. This is also true of all of Trump’s previous declarations of national emergency.
This order, whatever else it might be, is very in substance from its predecessors.
And therefore what? What’s your argument, and what statute are you citing to back it up?
Except that Obama’s DACA order instructed ICE to ignore immigration law (by telling them not to deport people here illegally), where’s Trump is attempting to enforce immigration law. Do you see the difference?
Max, you pointed out that no one cared about Trump’s previous orders. In response, I pointed out that Trump’s three previous orders were:
It seems to me that we should treat similar things the similarly and different things differently. Do you disagree?
Max, my point is that in both cases, the president decided to ignore Congress because he didn’t get his way. I think that’s wrong regardless of my feelings on the policy.
It’s not in any way ambiguous. The statute authorizes him to do it. Period.
While I like the idea of boarder enforcement, I am not really cheering this decision. Some of the arguments against doing this are fairly persuasive.
I just don’t find the line that this is not a “emergency” to be that strong. A good number of the prior National Emergencies (excluding times of war or terrorist attack) are either not an actual emergency or not a “national” problem but a problem dealing with people in other nations.
No, it won’t. I cheerfully state (admission is for sissies) that my judgement on such issues is largely situational, versus “principled” in the constricted sense you’d like to use if I let you.
In practice, which is all that matters, principles are mostly mentioned in the public sphere when their application benefits the left. This is the situation the left has created, so I’m just living with it.
It’s pissing off all the right people. It must be the best thing to do.
Henry:
“Having said all that, I think there is an argument for treating the border situation as an actual emergency — specifically, as a significant component in a pattern of wanton recklessness with the integrity of our electoral process, a pattern that includes states refusing to reveal electoral records to investigators, states defying federal immigration law, a party that seeks to abrogate immigration law through executive non-enforcement and the deliberate crippling of enforcement agencies, and the deliberate and increasing blurring of legal and non-legal status in the issuance of state identification documents.
In short, I think the Democratic party and its fellow travelers are engaged in a very real assault, through means both legal and illegal, on the integrity of future elections. That situation will shift from scandalous to serious to catastrophic — from the perspective of someone who values free and fair elections — unless something is done to change direction. And that may well warrant treating the lack of effective border security as an emergency.”
On this I agree with Henry.
The Progressives and Democrats are coordinating with outside foreign actors to encourage large numbers of illegals to violate the law and enter the country illegally. This situation has reached crisis proportions and is an emergency, which under the Constitution, the President has a duty to address. Failure to address this crisis has led to much criminal activity and to some extent a breakdown in law and order; a situation will only continue to get worse, perhaps much worse, if not addressed.
Congress approved the wall back in 2006 but then later sessions of Congress so far refused to fund it. To give a hypothetical example for guys like Fred and Valiuth, what if Trump and the Republicans in Congress refused to fund Obamacare after the Democratic Congress had approved it? The situation would be the same.
Congress has passed a law that defends the country’s interest, but then politicians of both parties have chosen not to fund it in the next budget cycle and thereafter in this case because: a) they are bought and paid for by those who want to flood America with cheap labor and b) they could care less about the destructive effects of these waves of cheap labor, criminals, drug dealers, human traffickers , and terrorists do to this country, particularly in the inner city.
What is even more appalling is how the Republican Establishment has turned it’s back on the voters that put them in office only to do crooked back room deals that benefit only themselves and their crooked benefactors and which in the end clearly hurt the country. I can only hope that the people of this country will come to understand the absolute treachery the Republican Establishment has tried to pull on the country and will short order exact their vengeance without mercy on these treacherous Republicans.
That assumes a national emergency is whatever a president wants it to be.
Lawmakers did not leave the term undefined so that it could applied without limits. Rather, like the Constitution’s authors and the authors of any law, they assumed reasonable and reliable interpretation of plain language.
It is impossible to draft any law to be impervious to misinterpretation. Few think to include definitions of terms in a law at a time when interpretations are generally agreed upon. It is only amid controversy that terms are normally defined.
There remains a general understanding on all sides of politics that an emergency is not only severe, even extraordinary, but also requires immediate action. There is no need for this action which did not exist a decade ago. The consequences of inaction would be dire, but not unusually so. The normal legislative process is neglected or frustrated, not inapplicable to the circumstances.
Did any of them involve moving around $8 Billion against the express wishes of Congress? The $8 Billion could not get a majority in the House, or reach the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, and Congress had already rejected the request for $5.7 Billion.
We already saw this movie with President Truman. It ended badly for him. It will end badly for Trump too. See the following Video from The Bulwark’s Editor in Chief Charlie Sykes.
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The normal Legislative process could have/should have dealt with Iran. We have had a National Emergency freezing their assets since Carter signed it in 1979. Most of them are this type of sanctions against people or countries. Few of the are severe, extraordinary or requiring immediate action.
I am not sure that this is a good idea for Trump. But an “emergency” as past Presidents have used the idea does not mean emergency as normal people think it does.
The actual Act does not seem to care what it is used for, just how it is implemented and how it is ended.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/HMAN-112/pdf/HMAN-112-pg1119.pdf
We elect presidents to make these types of executive decisions. That’s the way it has always been, and Trump exercising that authority (for the fourth time during his presidency) does not create a precedent for a future president, who will have the same authority, unless Congress repeals the law.
Yeah looking at the law itself, and the weird things that have been called an “emergency”, it would seem that every President could do this on virtually any issue since the 1976 National Emergency Act. The Act was created because there were some long term Emergencies and prior Presidents could do what ever they wanted with out siting any statute or creating a time that the “emergency” could end or without Congress being able to stop it.
Trump did not create precedent, it already existed. He may have empowered future Presidents to use this power more liberally.
Ideology blinds people. I find the free flow non Americans in our country to be disturbing. I know you don’t care about the free flow of drugs entering the country but people have been dying from overdoses in record numbers. And given the gangs that have been lawless in the drug trade, I think the totality of the situation constitutes an emergency.
A willfully uninformed opinion, at that.
Here is The “411” on “National Emergency”, including links to the law and extensive quotation of the relevant sections. As I explained there, “national emergency” is not “abracadabra,” it is only “open sesame” to access specific sections of a limited number of statutes that expressly address and authorize presidential action under a “national emergency.”
I quoted one of the two enabling sections, invoked by President Trump, in Declare National Border Emergency, Kill Two Birds with One Stone. The other is easy to also look up. I’ll just roll these up into an OP, I guess.
‘Record’ fentanyl drug bust made at US-Mexico border
The $1.4B came with all sorts of strings attached that in effect it would have been a pittance. Congress really gave him no choice.
In addition he gave Congress the deference to try to solve this first, but they punted. They played politics, so it was time to address the emergency head on.
That’s nice. But it doesn’t answer my [expletive] question:
If this is such an emergency, why wait until now?
Cussing — or redacted cussing — makes you sound so tough and dangerous.
It’s not an emergency. lol
Look, on the bright side a bunch of insane crap will happen, the dems will act like complete idiots, and we won’t even remember this happened 2 weeks from now.
I’m not sure about that. I think this is one of those things that might last a little longer.
Oh good. That’s what I was going for.
So your idea is that because past presidents have eroded our constitutional order this current one should continue the trend? That’s like saying we need to smother a fire with all these oil soaked rags.
Glad to see the brave passengers of this Flight 93 election have seized the plane, only to decide that the infidels do need to be killed so now they are going to crash the plane into the capital building.
Omg. It’s an emergency!
Oh God! Is there no strongman to save us from this sudden peril?!