Officials with the Justice Department (DOJ) have initiated a lawsuit against Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and his administration in regard to his choice to use shipping containers to create a new wall that sits along the southern border of the state with Mexico.
This past Wednesday, the Department of Justice filed the lawsuit within the U.S. District Couty for the District of Arizona, making the claim that the project openly trespasses onto federal property.
“Arizona has unlawfully and without authority failed to remove the shipping containers from lands owned by the United States or over which the United States holds easements, thereby damaging the United States,” explains the lawsuit.
This legal stunt takes place directly after Ducey put forth his own executive order this past August calling on the Department of Emergency and Military Affairs for the state to start a Yuma County project. The 3,820 feet of the previously exposed border was locked down by utilizing over 130 shipping containers over the course of the eleven-day project.
The project then expanded out to various other parts of the border, with another 6,680 feet of containers stacked up two-high across Cochise County by early November. That section is thought to take well over 2,700 shipping containers to cover the large 10-mile gap across the southern border.
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Back in October, the state initiated its own lawsuit in an effort to affirm its right to finish its plan to utilize the shipping containers to help stop unlawful crossings.
“Our border communities are overwhelmed by illegal activity as a result of the Biden administration’s failure to secure the southern border,” explained Ducey in a release.
“Arizona is taking action to protest on behalf of our citizens. With this lawsuit, we’re pushing back against efforts by federal bureaucrats to reverse the progress we’ve made. The safety and security of Arizona and its citizens must not be ignored. Arizona is going to do the job that Joe Biden refuses to do — secure the border in any way we can. We’re not backing down,” he stated.
The lawsuit became public after Ducey outright refused to go along with a series of demands from the Biden administration to take down the containers in the area of Yuma County. Officials for the state of Arizona explained to the Biden administration that the state would not be taking down the containers until a much more permanent barrier was built.
A warning went out from the Biden administration directed at Ducey stating that the containers have infringed on land near both Morelos Dam and land belonging to the Cocopah Indian Tribe’s West Reservation. It also made the arguement that such barriers directly interfere with the planned project of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to fill in the gaps in the already-built wall.
