The Biden administration told a federal judge Friday that it’s done selling off border wall materials for now 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 been rushing to dispose of bollards before Mr. Trump is inaugurated and hopes to use that material to restart construction.
Mr. Trump himself weighed in with a brief asking the judge to shut things down, citing a report in The Daily Wire that a sell-off was underway.
But Biden administration lawyer Andrew Warden called that report “speculation from a website” and said there is no imminent sell-off.
“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 agreed.
“It sounds like we have a proposed course of action,” he told the lawyers.
The wall has been a sore spot for eight years now, with Mr. Trump making it his most visible promise from the 2016 campaign and battling Congress over funding during his first term.
Congress gave him significantly less money than he wanted, so he triggered emergency powers and siphoned money from Pentagon accounts to continue construction, ending with more than 458 miles of barriers built in his first term.
His plans for nearly 300 more miles were in the works but short-circuited by his 2020 election loss and Mr. Biden’s Inauguration Day order to halt all barrier building.
That not only left hundreds of miles unbuilt, but it also left 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 subject of political and legal wrangling.
Mr. Biden revoked any money still unspent from the Pentagon accounts, but there was other money Congress had allocated that remained in limbo. Mr. Biden’s attempts to spend that cash on items other than wall construction met with resistance and, earlier this year, earned an order from Judge Tipton to stop.
Mr. Biden’s initial halt also left tons of construction materials — in particular steel bollards — piled in places along the border.
Mr. Biden’s administration says it is carrying out a part of the fiscal 2024 defense policy bill, which called for the Defense Department to come up with a plan to “use, transfer or donate to states on the southern border” any wall materials that had been 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 come up with the plan, 100 days to carry it out and 90 more days to report back 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 been given a crack at claiming those materials before they can be sold off.
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 get a first-hand look and said the state does, in fact, want first crack at the steel he saw.
“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.
But Mr Warden, the Justice Department lawyer, said Friday that no more bollards are planned for sale.
