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Sylvia Longmire IHSBy Sylvia Longmire
Contributor, In Homeland Security

If you’ve never heard of the game Cards Against Humanity, the creators describe it as a “party game for horrible people.” It involves using cards containing mostly very politically incorrect and offensive answers that players use to answer rather innocuous sounding questions. The game’s creators have a history of carrying out different tongue-in-cheek parodies and stunts for promotional purposes. However, the company behind the game got political when it purchased a plot of land on the southwest border in an attempt to delay the construction of the border wall proposed by President Donald Trump. The problem for the founders behind the plan is that their plan won’t work.

On November 14, the game company debuted a new website called Cards Against Humanity Saves America. In a section titled Cards Against Humanity Stops the Wall, the site says the following:

Donald Trump is a preposterous golem who is afraid of Mexicans. He is so afraid that he wants to build a twenty-billion dollar wall that everyone knows will accomplish nothing. So we’ve purchased a plot of vacant land on the border and retained a law firm specializing in eminent domain to make it as time-consuming and expensive as possible for the wall to get built. On Day 1, all Cards Against Humanity Saves America recipients will get an illustrated map of the land, a certificate of our promise to fight the wall, some new cards, and a few other surprises.

A Funny Protest

The company sold off pieces of the land plot for $15. Cards Against Humanity co-creator Max Temkin told Business Insider that the land purchase wasn’t designed to be a serious play to stop the border wall. For that, “we would need to win elections and hold political power,” he said. “But we do think it’s a funny protest, and possibly a delaying tactic.”

Temkin also said the company has retained a lawyer knowledgeable about eminent domain laws in order to initiate those delay tactics. However, The REAL ID Act of 2005 gives the Department of Homeland Security the authority to bypass dozens of pieces of legislation in order to build barriers along the border and elsewhere. Steve Silva, an eminent domain and land use attorney for Fennemore Craig law group in Reno, explained to USA Today that The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows the Federal Government to take property from people for “just compensation.”  Determining value is what usually ends up taking years in court, Silva said. The actual taking of the property takes very little time. That means that once the federal government has proven it has the right to take the property, it can do so immediately.

Government Can Seize Cards Against Humanity Plot

It also doesn’t matter how many people shelled out $15 for their little piece of the plot. The government can seize all the pieces at once, and all those individuals would end up fighting each other, Cards Against Humanity, and the government in order to receive that “just compensation.” Richard Epstein, Professor of Law at NYU, said emphatically to Mashable.com that Cards Against Humanity would not stand much of a chance against the government. Epstein was very certain that the company’s promotion would hurt their chances of winning any case the federal government might bring against it. “They are tacitly admitting that the goal is to block the president,” he said. “It’s one of the dumber ideas I’ve heard of.” Plot portion buyers may have been better off just using the $15 to buy the card game instead.