The Biden administration told a federal judge Friday that it has stopped selling off border wall materials and won’t get rid of anything else until President-elect Donald Trump takes office.
U.S. District Judge Drew B. Tipton said he will sign an order tying the government to that promise.
The agreement seems to settle an ongoing question about the wall materials and whether President Biden’s team has rushed to dispose of bollards before Mr. Trump is inaugurated. Mr. Trump hopes to use that material to restart construction.
Mr. Trump, citing a report in The Daily Wire, asked the judge to shut down the sell-off.
Biden administration attorney Andrew Warden called that report “speculation from a website” and said no sell-off was imminent.
“Nothing will leave the federal government for the next 30 days,” he said.
A group of Republican-controlled states, led by Texas, seized on the reported sell-off to demand clarity. Judge Tipton said a binding agreement was needed to end any sell-offs.
“It sounds like we have a proposed course of action,” he told the attorneys in a hearing Friday.
Mr. Trump celebrated the decision in a social media post.
“In a major, crucial WIN for America, and our National Security, a Federal Judge in Texas, based on papers we filed just a few days ago, has PROHIBITED the Biden Administration from selling any materials designated for the Border Wall, that has been wrecked by Biden and his cronies, and which I am going to rebuild in order to protect our Country from violent migrant crime, fentanyl smuggling, sex trafficking, terror attacks, and other heinous, Nation ending disasters,” Mr. Trump wrote.
The wall has been a sore spot for eight years. Mr. Trump made it his most visible promise of the 2016 campaign and battled Congress over funding during his first term.
Congress gave Mr. Trump significantly less money than he wanted, so he triggered emergency powers and siphoned money from Pentagon accounts to continue construction. In his first term, more than 458 miles of barriers were built.
His plans for nearly 300 more miles were in the works but were short-circuited by his 2020 election loss and Mr. Biden’s Inauguration Day order to halt all barrier building.
That left hundreds of miles unbuilt and holes in the wall that smugglers quickly exploited in the Biden migrant surge. Meanwhile, the materials already bought and billions of dollars still unspent have been the subjects of political and legal wrangling.
Mr. Biden revoked any money still unspent from the Pentagon accounts, but other money that Congress had allocated remained in limbo. Mr. Biden’s attempts to spend that cash on items other than wall construction met with resistance and earned an order from Judge Tipton to stop.
Mr. Biden’s initial halt left tons of construction materials, particularly steel bollards, piled in places along the border.
The Biden administration says it is implementing a part of the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill, which called for the Defense Department to develop a plan to “use, transfer or donate to states on the southern border” any wall materials deemed surplus.
The top priority was to use the materials in other construction at the border, such as to modernize border crossings or projects aimed at stopping illegal immigration.
The law, enacted in late 2023, gave Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin 75 days to develop the plan, 100 days to carry it out and 90 more days to report on what happened. Pentagon officials have said they are in the middle of those plans.
Texas argued in court documents that a pile of nearly 11,000 unclaimed bollards is sitting in the desert outside Tucson, Arizona. Under existing law, the state says, it should have tried claiming those materials before they could be sold.
William McKerall, a senior official at the Texas Facilities Commission, told the judge in a filing this week that he took a trip to Arizona to see the steel firsthand and that the state wants the first chance to claim it.
“I can state without reservation that these are in good condition and Texas is interested in acquiring most of the ~9,000 panels I surveyed at the Pinal Air Park in Arizona,” he said in a statement to Judge Tipton.
Mr. Warden, the Justice Department attorney, said Friday that no more bollards are planned for sale.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.