SAN RAFAEL VALLEY, Ariz. (AP) –
Work crews have steadily lifted hundreds of double-stacked shipping containers topped with barbed wire along Arizona’s remote eastern border with Mexico in a bold show of border enforcement by Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, even as he prepares to leave office.
Until protesters slowed and then largely halted work in recent days, Ducey pushed ahead over objections from the US government, environmentalists and an incoming governor who has called it a waste of resources.
Democratic Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs said last week that she was “looking at all options” and hasn’t decided what to do with the dumpsters after their Jan. 5 inauguration. He previously suggested repurposing dumpsters as affordable housing, an increasingly popular option for the homeless and low-income.
“I don’t know how much it will cost to remove the dumpsters and what the cost will be,” Hobbs told Phoenix PBS television station KAET in an interview Wednesday.
Federal agencies have told Arizona that construction on US land is illegal and ordered it to stop. Ducey responded on October 21 by suing federal officials over their objections, sending the dispute to court.
Environmental groups say the containers could endanger natural water systems and endanger species.
“A lot of damage could be done here between now and early January,” said Russ McSpadden, a southwest conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity who has been traveling to the site regularly since late October.
Ducey insists Arizona has sole or shared jurisdiction over the 60-foot (18.2-meter) strip where the containers rest and has a constitutional right to protect residents from the “imminent danger of humanitarian and criminal crises.”
“Arizona will do the job Joe Biden refuses to do: secure the border any way we can.” Ducey said when Arizona sued the US government. “We’re not backing down.”
Federal agencies want to dismiss Ducey’s complaint.
Border security was a focus of Donald Trump’s presidency and remains a powerful issue for Republican politicians. Hobbs’ Republican challenger, Kari Lake, campaigned on a promise to send the National Guard to the border on her first day in office. Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, recently re-elected to a third term, has pushed to continue building Trump’s signature wall on mostly private land along his state’s border with Mexico and has raised funds to help to pay it He has also drawn attention for busing migrants to Democratic-led cities far from the southern border, including New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, DC.
Ducey’s move comes amid a record flow of migrants arriving at the border. US border officials detained migrants 2.38 million times in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, a 37 percent increase from the previous year. The annual total topped 2 million for the first time in August and is more than double the highest level during Trump’s presidency in 2019.
Ducey’s container wall effort began in late summer in Yuma, in western Arizona, a popular crossing point with dozens of asylum seekers arriving daily and often finding ways to ‘evade the new barriers. Containers filled the areas left open when Trump’s 450-mile (724 km) border wall was built. But the remote San Rafael Valley, the latest construction site, is not typically used by migrants and was not included in Trump’s wall construction plan. McSpadden said he has seen no migrants or Border Patrol agents, only hikers and backpackers.
The construction stretches from the oak forests in the Huachuca foothills southeast of Tucson and across the prairies of the valley. By the middle of last week, cranes had hauled more than 900 blue or rust-colored metal containers down a freshly scraped dirt road into the landscape, then stacked them up to 17 feet (5.2 meters) high. height next to the vehicle barriers up to the waist. criss-crossed steel. The workers bolted the containers and welded sheets over gaps.
Still, yawning gaps remain in the new container wall, including an open space of several hundred yards (meters) in terrain too steep to place the containers. In some low wash areas there are gaps nearly three feet (1 meter) wide.
Environmental activists who demonstrated at the Cochise County site last week largely halted work in recent days by standing in front of construction vehicles. On a recent day, a dozen protesters sat on top of stacked dumpsters or on camp chairs near tents and vehicles where they sleep.
The work in Yuma cost about $6 million and was completed in 11 days with 130 of the containers covering about 3,800 feet (about 1,160 meters). The Bureau of Reclamation told Arizona that it violated US law by building on federal land. The Cocopah Indian tribe also complained that the state did not seek permission to build on their nearby reservation.
The newest project is much larger, costing about $95 million and using up to 3,000 containers to cover 10 miles (16 km), in southeast Arizona’s Cochise County. The US Forest Service also told Arizona to halt work in the Coronado National Forest and recently warned visitors of the potential dangers posed by construction crews involved in “unauthorized activities” in the state.
The Center for Biological Diversity has sided with the federal government’s position that the construction violates US law.
While Ducey’s lawsuit does not address environmental concerns, groups like the center say the work in the Coronado National Forest endangers endangered or threatened species such as the western yellow-billed cuckoo and the Mexican spotted owl, as well as big cats, including the occasional ocelot.
The biologically diverse region of southeastern Arizona is known for its “sky islands,” or isolated mountain ranges that rise more than 6,000 feet (1,828 meters) above “seas” of desert and grassland. Wildlife cameras in the region regularly photograph black bears, bobcats, wagtails, spotted skunks, white-nosed coatis and hog-like javelin.
McSpadden said the work has toppled oaks and junipers and found coils of razor wire and other construction debris on national forest land.
Environmentalists warn of the dangers of placing the containers on top of a watershed in the San Pedro River that floods during the monsoon season each summer. Just south of the border is a protected area called Rancho Los Fresnos, home to the beaver, an endangered species in Mexico.
Biologist Myles Traphagen of the Wildlands Network said at a briefing on border issues last month that much of the damage caused during construction of the Trump administration’s border wall was never fixed. Last year, he mapped the Arizona and New Mexico sections of that border wall to highlight damaged areas. A report this year highlights the areas the group considers priorities for reconstruction.
Dynamite explosions forever reshaped the remote Guadalupe Canyon in the southeast corner of Arizona. Tall steel bollards closed wildlife corridors, preventing animals such as little elf owls, pronghorns and big cats from Mexico from crossing into the United States to hunt and mate.
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Snow reported from Phoenix. Follow her on Twitter: @asnowreports