Three environmental groups are suing President Donald Trump's administration to stop further construction on the southern US border wall, arguing that it threatens endangered wildlife such as jaguars and wolves.

A boy carries a picture of Guatemalan 7-year-old Jakelin Caal, who died in a Texas hospital two days after being taken into custody by US border patrol agents in a remote stretch of the New Mexico desert, as her coffin is taken from Raxruha to the cemetery in San Antonio Secortez on Tuesday. Photo: AFP

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in US federal court in Washington by Defenders of Wildlife, Center for Biological Diversity and the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

Building a wall on the Mexican border was one of Trump's key campaign promises and has been one of his top government priorities.

When the US Congress failed to allocate enough funds for wall building, Trump declared a national emergency and reallocated funds from the military.

Tuesday's lawsuit argues that environmental harm "includes construction on protected federal lands including National Forests, and adverse impacts to threatened and endangered species listed under the Endangered Species Act, as well as their designated critical habitat."

The latest construction proposal "would block critical cross-border wildlife corridors and permanently impede recovery efforts for endangered species like the Mexican gray wolf and jaguar," said Jason Rylander, senior counsel for Defenders of Wildlife.

Brian Segee, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that Trump is "turning the borderlands into sacrifice zones" for the sake of the wall.

About 1,127 kilometers of the 2,899-kilometer border already has some form of fencing or vehicle barriers that wildlife can pass through, according to the legal complaint.

However, "the cumulative and irreversible impact of additional border fencing on wildlife populations becomes ever greater with each additional mile of border wall constructed," it states.