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by rafael carranza

arizona republic

may 20, 2020

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CORONADO NATIONAL MEMORIAL ~ Kimberly Lea and Kimberly Knebel hiked around Phoenix for months, carrying weights and monitoring their water use, in preparation to start hiking the first section of the Arizona Trail.

The scenic 800-mile-long route stretches from the Arizona-Utah state line south to the Coronado National Memorial, 4,750 acres of protected mountain landscapes and grassy plains on the Arizona-Mexico border.

That’s where the two women began their journey on Thursday:  at Border Monument 102.  The historic mile-marker, a worn metal sign, and a rusted, dilapidated barbed-wire fence mark the southern end of the trail.

However, construction crews are slated to replace the barbed wire with concrete footers that will hold 30-foot-tall, 6-inch-thick metal slats that will be spaced four inches apart.

“I think it’s terrible,” Knebel said.  “It’s going to ruin the landscape.  It’s not going to be pretty.  What is up there now, it’s hardly noticeable.”

There’s no timeline for construction here.  But 30-foot barriers would dramatically alter the landscape at this remote national park.

The mangled wire delineating the international boundary runs up and down the steep slopes of the Huachuca Mountains.  It still allows for sweeping views of the San Pedro Valley, the site where the Spanish expedition led by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado is believed to have entered into the modern-day United States in 1540.

In addition to metal bollard fencing, work crews will install lights and sensors.  They’ll also clear a 60-foot-wide swath of land along the mountains to accommodate construction equipment.

Arizona’s borderlands, including pristine areas such as the Coronado National Memorial, have become the epicenter of construction of President Donald Trump’s long-promised wall along the border with Mexico.

Crews are racing to complete a slew of barriers along approximately half of the state’s international border before Election Day, despite the global new coronavirus pandemic.

Contractors are in the process of building 161 miles of barriers along the state’s 372 mile-long border with Mexico.  An additional 80 miles of construction are in the pipeline, according to Customs and Border Protection.  If all planned projects are finished, the new 30-foot barriers would cover nearly two-thirds of Arizona’s border with Mexico.

Almost all of the ongoing or planned construction is taking place on land the U.S. government owns.  That includes national parks, monuments and conservation areas along the border.

Crews already have raised sagueros at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument near Lukeville and unearthed the wetlands of the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge east of Douglas.  Sites in the planning stages of construction include some of the most rugged and undisturbed areas of the state such as the Pajarito and Baboquivari Mountains west of Nogales.

“It’s a vision of division,” Lea said.

Farther up the trail, David Mabe disagreed.  He spent his Thursday morning at the Coronado National Memorial with his wife Josephine and their two dogs,

“I know these mountains intimately,” he said.

Mabe is a retired U.S. Border Patrol agent and helicopter pilot with U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s air and marine operations.  He spent nearly 20 years patrolling the border in southeastern Arizona, on land and from the air.

Even as he admitted that the flow of drugs and humans had slowed down over the years in the area near the memorial, Maybe said the border wall is necessary to keep out drugs and smugglers.

“The border wall, it doesn’t keep good people from coming across.  It’s just slowing down people making a lot of money off of people” he said.  “And they’re not good people…  The smugglers, the drug smugglers, the human smugglers, there is nothing good about those people.”

The border projects are funded by more than $13 billion that the Trump administration redirected from the Defense Department’s 2019 and 2020 budgets to build more fencing along the border.

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf traveled to the Arizona border on May 12 for an aerial tour of construction at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, one of several sensitive sites where construction has already started.

Wolf’s visit, his second so far this year, cemented the state’s role as a key piece in the administration’s plans to build the border wall.

The construction has unleashed a torrent of criticism from stakeholders along Arizona’s border, including environmental groups, community organizations and tribal leaders who fear it will destroy important heritage sites near the border and harm wildlife.

“Now the construction is moving into areas without any barrier, which are primarily the most remote, mountainous areas along the Arizona border and some of the best corridors for jaguars and other species,” said Brian Segee, a senior attorney with the Tucson based Center for Biological Diversity.

The group filed another lawsuit on May 12, the same day as Wolf’s visit to Arizona, to stop construction of border barriers, arguing the transfer of funds from the military’s 2020 budget to build the border wall is unlawful.  They filed a similar suit for the 2019 funds.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. border agency which Wolf oversees as Homeland Security chief, sought public comments on the latest round of planned projects in Arizona totaling 92 miles according to court records, that will likely be paid for with diverted 2020 budget funds.

The agency waived two dozen cultural and environmental laws in March to speed  up the construction in Arizona.  The waivers are another sore point with conservationists who worry that bypassing laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act will harm unique and fragile ecosystems.

Wolf said they’ve also reached out to environmental groups and advocates to “try to accommodate” their concerns.  But he made it clear construction would continue regardless.

“At the end of the day, I think the administration has been very clear on this front, which is border security is national security is homeland security,” he said,  “So we’re going to secure that border any way we can.”

Where the construction is happening

Customs and Border Protection, the agency managing construction jointly with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, created a map this month showing active and planned construction sites along the entire length of the U.S./Mexico border.

The map allows users to look up the location, length and construction status for projects that CBP has publicly announced or for which contracts have been awarded.  Some of the locations under construction show images of bulldozers and workers erecting the 30-foot barriers.

According to the projects listed in the CBP map, work is underway to complete 161 miles of new barriers in Arizona, replacing mostly dilapidated fencing or existing vehicle barriers.  The projects are broken down by the two Border Patrol sectors covering the Arizona/Mexico border, Tucson and Yuma.

The Yuma Sector is smaller; its 132 linear miles of border with Mexico is about  half of the Tucson Sector.  It’s where most of the construction is taking place.  Crews are working on 98 miles of border fencing throughout the sector, while another 10 miles near San Luis are in pre-construction.

In December, crews completed the first border wall project in Arizona under the Trump administration: replacing 22 miles of landing mat fencing with 30-foot bollards in San Luis.

Workers are adding primary and secondary fencing along the Barry M. Goldwater bombing range, replacing vehicle barriers with bollards along the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, as well as along the Colorado River.

The Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing the Trump administration, filmed drone footage of construction in a remote section of Cabeza Prieta.  The images show a bulldozer carving out portions of the Tinajas Altas Mountains to flatten the area where the bollard fencing will go.

“Sacrificing this living landscape for a useless border wall is criminal,” said Laiken Jordhal, the group’s borderlands campaign manager.  “We can rip the wall down, but we’ll never be able to piece back together the sacred sites and natural history obliterated by Trump’s racist border-wall fixation.”

Wolf, the acting Homeland Security secretary, toured wall construction along the Colorado River, west of Yuma, in January to mark the completion of 100 miles of “new border wall system,” to quote a plaque welded to the site during his visit. 

On May 1, Yuma Sector Chief Carl Landrum said via Twitter that crews permanently closed “a glaring gap in infrastructure near San Luis AZ that has been exploited by smugglers for as long as it has existed.  It is now more secure than ever!”

Images he attached to the tweet showed before and after photos of the Sanchez Canal, a well-documented crossing area located west of the San Luis port of entry,  Cameras have caught smugglers cutting through concertina wire just hours after it was installed near the canal.

Today, bollards welded together form a wall suspended over the canal.  The wall has 10 fencing panels that can be raised or lowered with a system of pulleys, the photos show.

Not all construction in the Yuma area has gone smoothly.

In December, the Defense Department Office of the Inspector General announced it would review a $400 million dollar contract awarded to Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. of Dickinson, North Dakota, to build 31 miles of fencing at Cabeza Prieta.

The investigation started amid reports that Trump pushed the Army Corps of Engineers to award Fisher Sand and Gravel a contract even though the company hadn’t met operational requirements and was late and over-budget in building one of eight border wall prototypes in San Diego in 2017.

Blasting draws condemnation

Border wall construction in the Tucson Sector has been more contentious.

CBP’s map shows that construction is underway for 63 miles of fencing in Cochise and Pima counties.  Another 69 miles in those two counties, plus Santa Cruz, is in the pre-construction phase.  That includes the project at the Coronado National Memorial known as Project Tucson B-6.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began blasting areas along the Arizona-Mexico border near the San Bernandino refuge in Douglas and Organ Pipe in Lukeville to loosen gravel.  They are building sturdier concrete footers to hold the metal bollards.

The detonations at Monument Hill, west of the Lukeville border crossing, drew widespread criticism and condemnation from the Tohono O’odham Nation, who consider the mountain sacred.  The tribe is concerned about several sites of cultural significance that are in close proximity to the border fence.

“For us, this is no different from DHS building a 30-foot wall along Arlington Cemetery or through the grounds of the National Cathedral,” Chairman Ned Norries testified before lawmakers in Washington D.C. in February.

CBP said its survey found no cultural or historical sites in the area, and that the blasting was limited to areas that had been previously disturbed.

On May 13, Clark Tenakhongva, the vice chairman for the Hopi Tribe in northern Arizona, sent a strongly worded letter to CBP in response to the agency’s request for public comments.

In the letter, Tenakhongva expressed his tribe’s solidarity with the Tohono O’odham Nation and demanded an immediate halt to the planning and preparations of border wall construction in southern Arizona.

“The Hopi Tribe claims cultural affiliation to earlier identifiable indigenous groups in the American Southwest including the Hohokam cultural group of Southern Arizona,” the vice chairman wrote.

“Since time immemorial, the Hopi Tribe has gained passage to Mexico and the rest of Central America through the Patatkwapi Trail and to this day, maintains its cultural and ceremonial connections to the indigenous groups to the south through this trail,” he added.

Tenakhongva criticized the Homeland Security Department for waiving several laws, including some aimed at preserving Native American graves and other archaeological artifacts, to expedite construction.

“The irreversible damage caused by the project to … ancestral Native American sites and the physical remains of our ancestors is unacceptable,” he wrote.

In southeastern Arizona, construction has continued at the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge.  It has yet to begin at the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, another ecologically sensitive site set for new barriers.  Environmental groups worry new barriers will wall off the San Pedro, the last undammed river in the Southwest, to the detriment of wildlife that use the river corridor to migrate north and south.

‘Completely meaningless excercise’

As the May 15 deadline to submit public comments on the latest round of planned border barriers neared, environmental advocates announced they had gathered and submitted 8,200 comments in opposition to the waivers and to border wall construction.

“Further wall construction would stop wildlife in their tracks, putting animals like box turtles, pronghorn, coatis, pygmy owls and black bears at risk ~ and ending the recovery of iconic species such as jaguar and ocelots in the U.S.,” said Emily Burns, a programs director with Tucson-based conservation group Sky Island Alliance.

It’s unclear if the submissions and input will influence how Customs and Border Protection rolls out construction along the additional 92 miles the agency identified in its waivers.  Despite participating in the comment process, conservation and advocacy groups on Friday signed a letter to Wolf and other senior border officials ripping it as a “completely meaningless exercise.”

The Trump administration is moving ahead with its plans to build a barrier in the Coronado National Memorial.  Surveyors had marked a spot approximately 60 feet north from Border Monument 102, where the Arizona Trail begins.

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