This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 23rd, 2017. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Trump's plan to build a wall along the southern border faces more than just a challenge to how effective it would be at

closing off the border, would also be one of the largest government takings of private property

in recent American history.

Ilia Soman, adjunct scholar scholar the Cato Institute explains.

President Trump has pledged to build a wall along the southern border.

Much of that land is owned. It is private property and in order

to build a wall on the US side of the border with Mexico, there have to be, a lot of that property has to be taken.

Very likely.

There's about 1,300 miles of additional land that would need to be acquired to build the wall.

Something like two-thirds of it is owned either by private parties or by state governments and

of the remainder there's also some owned by Native American tribes.

So a lot of that land would have to be taken by eminent domain or at least the owners pressured to sell under the threat of eminent domain.

So to what extent can lands that are owned by Native American tribes be taken under

eminent domain? This raises some very complicated questions that I'm not sure I'm fully competent to answer,

but there are a lot of special laws governing relations between the U.S. government and Native American tribes.

So I'm not entirely sure exactly what would need to be done

to deal with that area.

I'm an expert on eminent domain.

I'm not fully an extra a Native American law.

There's no question that this is a public use.

This is a government project that would be sitting on government land.

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