A group of establishment former officials and appointees will declare Monday that the cartels’ flood of lethal drugs, cheap labor, and reckless criminals across the southern border is not a national emergency, according to a report in the Washington Post.

The statement by 58 Republican and Democrat appointees is intended to provide evidence in the planned lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency and his construction of a border barrier.

“Under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today that entitles the president to tap into funds appropriated for other purposes to build a wall at the southern border,” the group’s planned statement states, according to the Washington Post.

In 2016, New York real estate developer Donald Trump was elected president to help fix the various problems that were created, ignored, or tolerated by many of the establishment officials who have signed the letter.

The Washington Post reported the planned announcement, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans signed:

Signing were Eliot A. Cohen, State Department counselor under President George W. Bush; Thomas R. Pickering, President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations; John F. Kerry, Obama’s second secretary of state; Susan E. Rice, Obama’s national security adviser; Leon E. Panetta, Obama’s CIA director and defense secretary; as well as former intelligence and security officials who served under Republican and Democratic administrations.

The establishment group downplays the growing economic problem of illegal migration, largely by ignoring the evidence that the cartel-aided Central American economic migrants are now using the catch and release rules to legally get through the border without having to take the risk of illegally walking through desert and scrubland.

According to the Washington Post, the group said that “illegal border crossings are at nearly 40-year lows. Undetected unlawful entries at the U.S.-Mexico border decreased from 851,000 to nearly 62,000 between 2006 and 2016, they said, citing Department of Homeland Security statistics.”

The argument ignores the damaging impact of cheap-labor migration on Americans’ wages and the impact of additional crime committed by migrants against Americans living outside wealthy enclaves. The group’s claim also assumes that Trump cannot declare an emergency because President George W. Bush did not declare an emergency — even though Bush wanted to tolerate high levels of illegal migration:

George W. Bush's aide slams Trump's reform to help Americans graduates. The reform ends Obama's bonus work-permits for 100,000 spouses of cheap H-1B visa workers who hold college-grad jobs in US. Biz hates plan b/c cheap visa workers = higher stock values https://t.co/lo21L97JGd — Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) February 23, 2019

The members of the group also downplay the drug problem, which killed roughly 40,000 people in President Barack Obama’s first year as president. By 2016, the death toll reached 63,000. In 2017, the death toll climbed to 70,000, and many reports suggest the deaths rose in 2018 while establishment politicians opposed Trump’s immigration reforms, border wall, border surveillance, and deportation efforts.

According to the Post, the signers “state that there is no drug trafficking emergency that can be addressed by a wall along the southern border, noting that ‘the overwhelming majority of opioids’ that enter the United States are brought in through legal ports of entry, citing the Justice Department.”

Advocates of the border wall do not say it will end drug deaths. But they say a barrier can help block the movement of drugs and drug traffickers who distribute the drugs into the United States, especially as border officials step up surveillance of vehicles passing through the ports of entry: