The Department of Justice is asking the court to dismiss a suit brought by Gov. Doug Ducey’s administration that tries to claim state sovereignty of federal borderland. The motion is the latest filing in a court battle over Ducey’s project to create a makeshift border wall of shipping containers.
Ducey’s shipping container wall first showed up on a strip of borderland near Yuma, on Bureau of Reclamation Land, and more recently in Cochise County, on U.S. Forest Service land.
The containers went up without federal permission and the agencies have called for their removal. But in a federal suit filed in October, Arizona asked a judge to stop the federal government from intervening and argued the state should have jurisdiction over the border area.
The DOJ’s new filing asks the court to dismiss that suit. It argues Arizona’s claims make the "bald assertion" that the land where the containers are placed is state land, rather than federal land, an assertion the DOJ says flies in the face of agreements that go back more than a century.
