While the coronavirus pandemic has delayed many legal proceedings, court actions by the U.S. government to take private property for the Mexican border wall have accelerated, reports the Wall Street Journal. Since March, the government has filed 24 cases against South Texas landowners for the wall, more than the previous eight months combined. The Trump administration has made little progress on the construction of a border wall, the president’s signature campaign promise. Since 2017, the government has built 194 miles of wall along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, most of it replacing existing walls or fences. Three miles of wall have been constructed where none was before. The U.S. has plans to build 731 miles at a cost of $15 billion.
Of 250 landowners in the path of 69 miles of border wall planned for the Laredo area, about half have signed rights of entry to allow the government to survey for the wall. Building a border wall in Texas involves a complicated preliminary process of obtaining property from hundreds of private landowners. If owners are unwilling to give up the land voluntarily, the government must sue them in federal court twice: first, for the right to survey and second, to take the land. That lengthy process is part of the reason why little new wall has been built in Texas.