Kazuhiro Nogi/AP
The budget for President Donald Trump’s border wall has shrunk by $2.5 billion, after a federal judge in Northern California issued a pair of rulings blocking the president from using military funding to build parts of the wall on Friday.
Hours after the ruling, Trump said that a father and daughter from El Salvador, whose drowning in the Rio Grande was made famous by a chilling photo circulating this week, would not have died if his border wall was built. Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria drowned while trying to cross the river into the United States, after failing to be granted asylum in Mexico. “If they thought it was hard to get in, they wouldn’t be coming up,” the president claimed during a G-20 press conference in Osaka, Japan. And if congressional Democrats just allowed Trump to do what he wanted with immigration law, he added, “things like that wouldn’t happen.”
In May, Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. blocked the White House from using Department of Defense funding to build a border wall in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, according to Politico. Friday’s ruling makes that ban permanent, and expands it to more areas of the border, including California. In his May order, Gilliam wrote that the Trump administration’s effort to shift military funds violated the “fundamental separation of powers principles dating back to the earliest days of our Republic.”
Trump called Gilliam an “activist Obama appointed judge” in a May 25 tweet.
Another activist Obama appointed judge has just ruled against us on a section of the Southern Wall that is already under construction. This is a ruling against Border Security and in favor of crime, drugs and human trafficking. We are asking for an expedited appeal!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 25, 2019
This piece has been corrected to accurately reflect the age of the child who drowned at the border.
