Donald Trump hires lawyers to seize Americans' property along US-Mexico border

Estimates for the cost of the wall - around $70bn - have not included the cost of obtaining property from people

A Mexican policeman observes activists painting the border wall between the cities of Ciudad Juarez and Sunland Park (Herika Martinez/AFP/Getty)

The Trump administration has hired 12 attorneys to help acquire land needed to build the US-Mexico border wall.

The team of lawyers will work to gain control of property from landowners in order to make room for the wall.

According to a new report issued by the Senate Homeland Security Committee Democrats, there is no clear, full budget for this or any indication of how many Americans will be affected.

Estimates for the cost of the wall vary, but Senate Democrats have floated a $70bn (£53.2bn) figure - which does not include property acquisition and the settlements to those property owners.

President Donald Trump told Fox News earlier this month he believes the wall will cost no more than $18bn but it is unclear on what factors he is basing that figure given costs of different materials for different terrain along to the 2,000-mile (3,218km) border, labour, and construction.

It flies in the face of his own repeated claims for over a year that he would get Mexico to pay for the wall to stem illegal immigration from their country and Central America into the US.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox famously offered current President Enrique Pena Nieto some advice earlier this year when he said on CNN: “you could use my words, ‘We’ll never pay for that f****** wall.’”

On 25 July, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the Army Corps of Engineers began to inspect public records of properties in an attempt to exercise the government’s right to eminent domain, though it has a “preference for voluntary sales,” according to the report.

Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee said in a statement: “Before spending billions of taxpayer dollars on the construction of a wall along the southwest border, CBP, DHS, and the President have an obligation to Congress – and to the American people – to address questions related to land acquisition that, to date, remain unanswered.”

Mr Trump has called eminent domain - or the government's right to seize the property from owners - as “wonderful,” “a good thing,” and “an absolute necessity" on different occasions.

There are approximately 90 cases in Texas alone, pending since 2007 when the federal government first began seizing land for border fortifications.

However, the administration has requested an initial $2 million for attorneys at the Department of Justice to initiate “land seizures from holdout landowners who aren’t willing to part with their property on the government’s terms,” as Newsweek reported.

And, per the report, the administration’s aim to take control of “hundreds or thousands of parcels of land” that are needed for wall construction.

Part of the issue is not beginning new litigation, but restarting old cases that were quiet during Barack Obama’s administration.

CBP has already spent $78m to get the land for only 211 miles of the southwest border.

That took nearly 330 lawsuits, according to Newsweek.

Some parts of the border will not be available to the wall because of national parks and protected land, but at least $1.6bn has been allocated in next year’s budget to build 74 miles of the wall.