Trump declares national emergency to fund the wall

While President Trump declared a national emergency today in order to secure funding for his border wall, his Trump administration still hasn’t acquired the land it needs to build new physical barriers along the border, even as it embarks on new construction.

The timeline for construction for the first new 14 miles of wall — which is expected to begin in late March — partly depends on real estate acquisitions, according to a senior CBP official.

The start of construction was already pushed back from February to March, according to CBP estimates. It’s unclear what led to the delay.

How this will work: The administration plans to target the Rio Grande Valley, where much of the land is privately owned. Generally, the government is allowed to acquire privately owned land if it's for public use, otherwise known as eminent domain.

The first approximately 14 miles of steel bollard wall to be built in the region will be on a combination of federal land and private land, which is still in the process of being acquired, said the official.

Eminent domain cases can be lengthy, though they generally don’t keep CBP from being able to proceed with construction. Landowners are often fighting for what is known as just compensation — what they deem a fair price for their property.

According to the Justice Department, as of last month, approximately 80 cases were still outstanding.

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Warren: Trump 'may not even be a free person' by 2020

President Donald Trump might be in jail by the time Election Day comes around, Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said on her first full day of campaigning as a declared presidential candidate.

"By the time we get to 2020, Donald Trump may not even be President," Warren said to voters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, gathered at the Veterans Memorial Building. "In fact, he may not even be a free person."

The moment marked a notable shift in tone for Warren, who has been reluctant to take on Trump directly by name since she announced her exploratory campaign on New Year's Eve.

Lamenting that the country is in a "dangerous moment," the Massachusetts Democrat said, "What happens in 2020 is going to determine the direction of our nation, the direction of our people."

"Every day, there's a racist tweet, a hateful tweet, something really dark and ugly," Warren said of Trump. "And what are we, as candidates, as activists, the press, going to do about it? Are we going to let him use those to divide us?"

The answer to that question, Warren went on to say, was to avoid the trap of engaging in every one of Trump's actions.

"Here's how I see it: Donald Trump is not the only problem we've got. Yeah. Donald Trump is the symptom of a badly broken system," Warren said. "So, our job as we start rolling into the next election is not just to respond on a daily basis. It's to talk about what we understand is broken in this country, talk about what needs to be done to change it and talk about how we're going to do that, because that is not only how we win, it's how we make the change we need to make."

A Warren campaign official told NTS that the presidential candidate does not plan to engage in every single tweet or attack from Trump as the 2020 season ramps up. Much as she has been doing over the last month, Warren will continue to ignore much of his "every day efforts to divide and distract," the official said, noting that Warren wanted to use her first event of the day to explain her rationale for this strategy.

Warren officially launched her campaign in Massachusetts on Saturday, where she issued a challenge to the super wealthy and called Trump "just the latest and most extreme symptom of what's gone wrong in America."

Warren's weekend kickoff saw her formally joining a growing field of candidates for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination as the group competes for the opportunity to unseat Trump

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