National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States

Based on Wikipedia: National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States

In February 2019, Donald Trump did something no American president had ever done before: he declared a national emergency to spend money that Congress had explicitly refused to give him.

This wasn't just another presidential power move. It was a fundamental challenge to the Constitution's separation of powers—the idea that Congress, not the president, controls the federal purse strings. And it set off a legal and political firestorm that would rage for years, raising questions about executive power that still resonate today.

The Wall That Couldn't Get Funded

To understand the emergency declaration, you need to understand how spectacularly Trump had failed to get his signature campaign promise funded through normal channels.

For two full years, Trump had neglected to prioritize the border wall legislatively. No single administration official had been designated to champion it in Congress. The effort was, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "lost amid competing priorities and divisions within his administration."

The missed opportunities were stunning. In January 2018, Democrats offered Trump twenty-five billion dollars for wall construction—more than he was asking for—in exchange for a path to citizenship for Dreamers, young immigrants brought to the United States as children. Trump rejected it. He rejected a similar deal the following month.

Then came an almost farcical moment in March 2018. Congress approved a bill with one-point-six billion dollars for border barriers. Trump threatened to veto it. His aides had to inform him that one-point-six billion was actually the exact amount his own budget had requested. His budget director, Mick Mulvaney, then privately advised Trump to blame House Speaker Paul Ryan for not seeking more money.

Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman, captured the strategic failure perfectly: "The mistake they made was not coming in right away and coming up with a plan. You wonder why they didn't try to jam this through when Republicans controlled the House because it's a lot more complicated now trying to convince Nancy Pelosi."

By late 2018, Republicans had lost control of the House. Trump's window for easy wall funding had closed.

The Longest Shutdown in American History

Unable to get the money through normal legislation, Trump chose confrontation. He demanded that the annual spending bill include five-point-seven billion dollars for the wall.

In December 2018, the Republican-controlled Senate unanimously passed a spending bill without wall funding. But Trump refused to support it, so the Republican-controlled House never considered it. And at midnight on December twenty-second, the federal government shut down.

It would stay shut for thirty-five days—the longest government shutdown in American history.

About one-fourth of government activities stopped. Eight hundred thousand federal employees were furloughed or forced to work without pay. Another one million federal contractors lost income. The Congressional Budget Office later estimated the shutdown cost the economy at least eleven billion dollars—nearly double what Trump had demanded for the wall.

By mid-January, public opposition to the shutdown had become overwhelming. The newly elected representatives took office, giving Democrats control of the House. They passed the same spending bill the Senate had unanimously approved in December. Trump said he'd veto it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked the Senate from even voting on any bill Trump might veto, including the one the Senate had previously passed unanimously.

The political stalemate was complete.

On January twenty-fifth, Trump blinked. He agreed to reopen the government for three weeks. But he made a threat: if Congress didn't give him wall funding by February fifteenth, he would either shut down the government again or declare a national emergency and take the money from elsewhere.

Proclamation Nine Eight Four Four

On February fourteenth, Congress passed a bipartisan spending bill that included one-point-three-seven-five billion dollars for fifty-five miles of border fencing. That's less than a quarter of what Trump had demanded, and it was for fencing, not a wall.

Trump signed it. He called it inadequate, but he signed it. He wasn't going to risk another shutdown.

Instead, the next day—February fifteenth, 2019—he declared a national emergency.

Standing in the White House Rose Garden, Trump announced his plan to access eight billion dollars for border security by diverting money Congress had already allocated for other purposes. The breakdown was audacious: three-point-six billion dollars from military construction projects, two-point-five billion from the Department of Defense's counter-drug programs, and six hundred million from the Treasury Department's asset forfeiture fund.

Then Trump said something that would haunt him in court: "I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn't need to do this, but I'd rather do it much faster."

Critics immediately seized on this admission. If he didn't need to do it, how could it be an emergency?

An Unprecedented Power Grab

Presidential emergency declarations weren't new. By 2019, American presidents had issued fifty-eight of them under the National Emergencies Act of 1976. Many were still in effect, dealing with everything from terrorism to foreign asset seizures.

But Trump's declaration was different in a fundamental way: none of the previous emergency declarations had been used to circumvent Congress's explicit refusal to appropriate money.

The Constitution is clear on this point. Article One gives Congress—not the president—the power of the purse. The Appropriations Clause states that "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." Congress had considered Trump's request for wall funding and said no. Now Trump was using emergency powers to take the money anyway.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it "a lawless act, a gross abuse of the power of the presidency and a desperate attempt to distract from the fact that President Trump broke his core promise to have Mexico pay for his wall."

But the criticism wasn't just from Democrats. Some Republicans worried Trump was setting a dangerous precedent. If a Republican president could declare an emergency to build a wall Congress had refused to fund, what would stop a future Democratic president from declaring an emergency to enact a Green New Deal or universal healthcare that Congress had rejected?

Congress Tries to Stop It

The National Emergencies Act includes a check on presidential power: Congress can terminate an emergency declaration by passing a joint resolution.

On February twentieth, Pelosi announced that Democrats would introduce such a resolution. House Joint Resolution Forty-Six was straightforward: it simply stated that Trump's emergency declaration was "hereby terminated."

On February twenty-seventh, the House passed it by a vote of two hundred forty-five to one hundred eighty-two. Thirteen Republicans joined all Democrats in voting to terminate the emergency.

The real drama came in the Senate. Republican Senator Rand Paul announced he would vote for the resolution, saying it was about defending Congress's constitutional role, not about the wall itself. He claimed at least ten other Republican senators privately agreed with him.

On March fourteenth, the Senate voted fifty-nine to forty-one to terminate the emergency. Twelve Republicans had broken with their president.

But Trump vetoed the resolution on March fifteenth, calling it "reckless." To override the veto, Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers. The House vote on March twenty-sixth fell short: two hundred forty-eight votes to override, versus the two hundred eighty-six needed.

Trump's emergency declaration stood. Congress tried again in October 2019, but again failed to override Trump's veto.

The Courts Step In

Trump had predicted the legal challenges. In his Rose Garden announcement, he'd said he expected to lose in lower courts but ultimately prevail at the Supreme Court.

He was half right.

Within days, six separate lawsuits were filed. Three stand out:

El Paso County, Texas, partnered with the Border Network for Human Rights to challenge the declaration in the Western District of Texas. Public Citizen sued on behalf of the Frontera Audubon Society and Texas landowners whose property stood in the wall's path. And sixteen states, led by California, filed suit in the Northern District of California.

The California lawsuit argued that Trump's executive order violated the Appropriations Clause by diverting six-point-seven billion dollars that Congress had appropriated for Department of Defense projects to wall construction under different agencies. The lawsuit pointed out that Congress had explicitly considered and rejected this same project when proposed as a Department of Homeland Security initiative.

A second major case came from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition. Both the California and ACLU cases landed before Judge Haywood Gilliam Junior.

In May 2019, Judge Gilliam issued a temporary injunction blocking Trump from diverting funds not explicitly appropriated by Congress for the wall. He wrote: "Congress's 'absolute' control over federal expenditures—even when that control may frustrate the desires of the Executive Branch regarding initiatives it views as important—is not a bug in our constitutional system. It is a feature of that system, and an essential one."

In June, the temporary injunction became permanent. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it.

But then Trump got his Supreme Court win—sort of.

The Supreme Court's Split Decision

In July 2019, the Supreme Court issued a one-paragraph ruling in Trump v. Sierra Club. By a five-to-four vote, it stayed Judge Gilliam's injunction, allowing wall construction to continue while litigation proceeded.

The Court's reasoning was technical: the majority found that the Sierra Club likely lacked legal standing to bring the lawsuit in the first place. This wasn't a judgment on the merits of whether Trump's emergency declaration was constitutional. It was a procedural decision about whether these particular plaintiffs could challenge it.

But the practical effect was clear: construction could proceed.

In October 2019, a different case in Texas took a different path. U.S. District Judge David Briones found that El Paso County and the Border Network for Human Rights did have standing to challenge the diversion of three-point-six billion in military construction funds. In December, he issued a permanent injunction blocking that diversion.

That injunction was overturned in January 2020, allowing construction to resume.

By June 2020, the Ninth Circuit had affirmed Judge Gilliam's ruling in both the states' case and the Sierra Club's case, ruling that the reappropriation of funds was unlawful. Trump petitioned to the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the case in the 2020-2021 term. But the Court refused to stop ongoing construction while the case proceeded.

The legal wrangling continued, case by case, injunction by injunction. Some legal challenges to the similar Secure Fence Act of 2006 remained open more than a decade later. The border wall litigation seemed destined for a similar fate.

The Money That Was Already Spent

Meanwhile, implementation of the emergency declaration faced practical problems.

Roll Call reported in late February 2019 that over one-third of the funds Trump had identified for diversion had already been spent by the Department of Defense on their originally intended projects. The Pentagon issued a list of military construction projects that could potentially be postponed so their funding could go to the wall instead—projects like schools for military families, training facilities, and base infrastructure.

The Pentagon did authorize up to one billion dollars to be transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers for barrier construction. But the full eight billion Trump had promised never materialized in the way he'd described.

Extended, Terminated, and Reinstated

Emergency declarations under the National Emergencies Act don't last forever. They expire after one year unless the president extends them.

On February thirteenth, 2020, Trump extended Proclamation Nine Eight Four Four for another year. He extended it again on January fifteenth, 2021, just five days before leaving office.

But on January twentieth, 2021—his first day in office—President Joe Biden terminated the emergency declaration and paused all wall construction. In a letter to Congress dated February eleventh, Biden called Trump's original declaration "unwarranted" and pledged that no additional government funds would be used for wall construction.

Interestingly, Biden did use remaining allocated funds for some border barrier work in 2023, showing how the practical politics of border security can complicate ideological positions.

Then, on January twentieth, 2025, Donald Trump began his second term as president. Among his first acts: reinstating the national emergency concerning the southern border via executive order.

The cycle had come full circle.

What It All Meant

The 2019 border emergency declaration was never really about immigration policy, border security, or even the wall itself.

It was about a fundamental question of constitutional power: Can a president use emergency declarations to spend money that Congress has explicitly refused to appropriate?

For two centuries, the answer had been no. The Founders designed the Constitution to prevent exactly this scenario. They gave Congress the power of the purse precisely because they feared executive overreach. A monarch who could tax and spend without legislative consent was tyranny. An elected president constrained by congressional appropriations was republicanism.

Trump's declaration tested whether that constraint still held. And the answer was complicated.

Congress passed a resolution to terminate the emergency, but couldn't override the president's veto. The courts issued injunctions, but the Supreme Court allowed construction to continue on procedural grounds. Money was diverted, though not the full amount promised, and not without legal consequences that continued for years.

The emergency declaration succeeded in getting some wall built that Congress hadn't funded. But it failed to establish a clear precedent. The legal challenges continued. The political backlash was real. And within two years, a new president had terminated the emergency entirely.

What Trump's 2019 declaration proved was this: the constitutional system has checks and balances, but they move slowly and imperfectly. A determined president can push boundaries and accomplish goals that Congress opposes, at least temporarily. But the costs—political, legal, and constitutional—can be substantial and long-lasting.

And now, with Trump back in office and the emergency reinstated, we may be about to learn those lessons all over again.