US-Mexico Border Wall Slicing through Fragile Ecosystems

Democracy Now!
April 27, 2009


We take a look at the environmental impact of the 600 miles of barricades along the US-Mexico border. The wall slices across fragile ecosystems in public lands, parks and refuges, threatening rare species and disrupting wildlife migration. We speak with the chair of the Sierra Club Borderlands Team in Arizona.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you to stay with us, Isabel Garcia, as we turn now to another guest, who is looking at the environmental impact of the 600 miles of barricades along the US-Mexico border. The wall slices across fragile ecosystems in public lands and parks and refuges, threatening rare species and disrupting wildlife migration. The wall went up and continues to be built in violation of thirty-six environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act.

It’s because of Section 102 of the REAL ID Act passed by Congress in 2005 that gives unprecedented power to the Homeland Security secretary to waive all local, state and federal laws in order to build walls and roads along all US borders. These are the allegations of the Sierra Club.

We’re joined now in Washington, DC, by Sean Sullivan. He’s chair of the Sierra Club’s Borderlands Team in Arizona, in Washington to lobby against the wall and in favor of legislation introduced by Arizona Democratic Congress member Raul Grijalva, that would repeal Section 102 of the REAL ID Act and better protect the desert environment.

Sean, welcome to Democracy Now! Explain exactly what you see happening to the environment here.

SEAN SULLIVAN: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.

Going back to 1995, when—where we can point to bad border policy, walls began to be erected in urban areas such as San Diego and El Paso, and it was these areas where a majority of the migrant traffic would cross through. Now, Border Patrol erected walls to purposefully push migrants into these fragile areas, which resulted in environmental damage and, of course, also the loss of life to many migrants. And this was done on purpose by Border Patrol to better apprehend migrants, so they say.

So, we saw a shift in migration to areas that normally didn’t see the numbers. And then, as numbers in migrants shifted into these areas, we saw the construction of border walls. And these border walls were constructed along wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, and in areas that are very unique and very diverse to North America and contain a number of endangered species. One of the main problems that we see with the construction of border walls is the blockage of bi-national corridors. There are a number of wildlife species who rely on habitat on both sides of the borders. Wildlife do not recognize political boundaries.

One instance of that is 200 miles south of the Arizona border in Mexico, there’s a breeding population of jaguars. And recently these jaguars have dispersed back into Arizona and New Mexico, back to their historic habitat, which in the past, before they were hunted in the United States, ranged all the way north to the Grand Canyon. So, that is—we’re seeing across the entire border in many areas in all four border states. And what’s—

AMY GOODMAN: And what kind of reception are you getting right now, Sean, in Washington, as you’re there lobbying? And who are you meeting with?

SEAN SULLIVAN: We are initially meeting with representatives in the House that have been supportive of a similar bill that was introduced last session, like you said, which will repeal this power granted in Section 102 of the REAL ID Act. It will enable mitigation monies to be distributed to borderlands for restoration projects. And it will ensure that DHS communicates with people on the ground, with land managers, with local communities, with tribal nations, so the people who live on the border have the chance to have meaningful dialog when decisions are made about border security.

We hope to have a companion bill in the Senate shortly, and we have a real hope of getting the process fixed this session. It’s going to take an act of Congress to fix this. This is not something that’s going to be—come down from the administration or fixed by the judicial branch. We need Congress to take back the power, to restore law along the border, to restore the checks and balances of border policy.

AMY GOODMAN: Isabel Garcia, last ten seconds, your comment here?

ISABEL GARCIA: It’s really interesting that we passed the REAL ID Act, the 102 Section, basically allowing the wholesale violation of thirty-six laws. Yet, immigrants are being prosecuted at a huge cost to the US taxpayer for their alleged crime of illegal entry. I think our nation must hear the truth. Unfortunately, not much of the truth is being told to the Congress, to this administration. And we are in a critical situation, in particular in Arizona, with the devastating impact of all of the so-called border security measures on all aspects of our community.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Isabel Garcia of Derechos Humanos, thank you so much for being with us from Tucson.

ISABEL GARCIA: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: And thank you so much to Sean Sullivan, chair of the Sierra Club Borderlands Team, and Dan Millis of No More Deaths.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/27/us_mexico_border_wall_slicing_through

Obama, guns, and Eloisa Tamez

San Antonio Current
April 17, 2009
by Greg Harman

Eloisa Tamez, who you may remember from the Current’s border series, is headed back to South Texas today.

She had been presenting at a conference in Albuquerque about the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border when she got word that back at home a federal judge had ruled that U.S. Homeland Security has the right to take a quarter-acre of her South Texas border land. This is land in her family inhabited before Spanish colonization, she has argued, and was deeded to her relatives through a Spanish Land Grant.

It’s been a year since Tamaz walked with me atop the earthen levy on the back side of her property. For the university professor, it’s been a year of going in and out of court fighting Homeland Security.

While I couldn’t reach Eloisa this morning, her daughter Margo returned by call, sharing how distraught she and her mother were on hearing the news yesterday.

Margo said compounding the shock was the fact that her mother had approached no fewer than six different appraisal companies trying to get a good appraisal on her land with no luck.

One finally agreed, Margo Tamez said, but then “fell off the face of the earth.”

The ramifications of the ruling for more than a dozen other landowners that had joined her mother’s lawsuit is unclear, she added.

Prominent and sustained violence in several Northern Mexico border towns appears to have provided the government justification to continue forward with nearly 700 miles of border wall construction ordered by Congress, in spite of the hope many had held out that Obama’s new administration could force a policy reversal.

However, when President Obama met with fellow Harvard alum President Felipe Calderon yesterday in Mexico City, individual liberty and indigenous land rights weren’t on the agenda.

Crime was.

From CNN, we read:

"At a time when the Mexican government has so courageously taken on the drug cartels that have plagued both sides of the borders," Obama said alongside Calderon in a ceremony in Mexico, "it is absolutely critical that the United States joins as a full partner in dealing with this issue, both through initiatives like the Merida Initiative, but also on our side of the border in dealing with the flow of guns and cash south."

Individual liberty and indigenous land rights have received little mention in the court of U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen. (For more on human rights and the Wall, check out the analysis of this University of Texas-based group.)

To visit, it seems bizarre to think seizing property in out-of-the-way El Calaboz could have any impact on guns heading south or drugs coming north. If that’s the point.

The New Mexico Independent caught up with Tamez, adding to the discussion:

What many may not realize is that in Texas the federal government is using eminent domain powers to take private property of U.S. citizens north of the border in order to build the so-called border wall, often effectively cutting property owners off from their land south of the newly constructed wall.

The massive wall being constructed along the U.S./Mexico border does not sit on the actual border, which in Texas is the Rio Grande.

Tamez’s land was once part of the San Pedro de Carricitos Land Grant, created by the King of Spain in 1767. While it was handed down to Tamez through many generations, her heritage on the land actually predates even the land grant, she explained. Tamez’s ancestors include tribal members of the indigenous Lipan Apache.

In recent months, El Calaboz, a small community outside Brownsville, has been overrun by Homeland contractors in burst of a sort of “mili-tourism,” Margo Tamez told me.

Nebraska plates are in abundance, thanks to Halliburton subsidiary Kiewit, she said. “They’ve just been overrun by Nebraska license plates."

http://www.sacurrent.com/blog/queblog.asp?perm=69675

Border fences grow, as does debate that rages over them

Arizona Daily Star
March 15, 2009
by Brady McCombs

NOGALES — Three men prop a ladder on top of a tree branch and lean it against a 15-foot border fence made of steel tubes so close together a man can't fit his head through.

One by one, they climb over and shimmy down the other side, landing in the United States at the bottom of the Mariposa Wash, about two miles west of Nogales. They jog north across a concrete road, fading into the brush.

On a nearby ridge, a U.S. Border Patrol agent watches, then jumps in his SUV and speeds down the new access road that, like the fence, is part of the biggest, fastest and most expensive buildup of border infrastructure in U.S. history.

The three illegal border crossers run, but it isn't long before several agents converge and eventually find their hiding spot.

The scene illustrates the debate over the effectiveness of border fences that now cover one-third of Arizona's 378 miles of U.S.-Mexico border, up from 7 percent three years ago.

"These fences present between a 30-second to two-minute speed bump for most healthy individuals," said Matt Clark, Southwest representative of Defenders of Wildlife, a group that works to protect endangered species. "We are paying how many millions of dollars for this?"

Walls, particularly unguarded, have historically been shown to be ineffective, he said.

"It's just a piece of scrap metal that will be jumped over, tunneled under, gone around," Clark said. "At the end of the day, it's just a big waste of money."

Clark and other critics say the economic recession, and not the fence, is responsible for the decline in illegal immigration in the past two years and that border crossers will always find a way to defeat it, no matter how many miles it stretches or how menacing it appears.

"They can build a fence to the heavens, and they will find a way to get across," Mexican rancher Juan Soto Moreno said in Spanish. He owns four acres along the border east of Sonoyta, Sonora, where a new five-mile steel- mesh pedestrian fence lines the southern border of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. "Forget about it. They are never going to stop them."

The Border Patrol sees the same scene as an example of how the fences help the patrol.

"When you are crossing a fence 15 feet in the air, it's a lot easier for me to see," said Alan White, Border Patrol Nogales station chief. "With a barrier that they have to negotiate, it gives us a little more time to react and catch these people."

Border Patrol officials acknowledge that the barriers are not a panacea but say they deter, slow and funnel traffic, providing them with a tool that gives them the upper hand in the eternal cat-and-mouse game with smugglers. They credit the fences, along with the increase in agents, for a 36 percent decrease in apprehensions in the Tucson Sector over the past two years.

"These fences are absolutely necessary," White said. "I can't look you in the eye and tell you I'm doing a good job without these barriers."

Menacing barriers

The international border flows up and down rolling hills covered with green shrubs and brown mesquite as it stretches east and west out of Nogales.

Five years ago, it was difficult to decipher exactly where the international line was. Marked only by three- or five-strand barbed-wire fences, an occasional border monument every couple of miles and only a few miles of dirt roads, it required close inspection to figure it out.

That's not the case anymore.

The George W. Bush-led buildup has hardened large stretches of international boundary, transforming it with 308 miles of menacing fences and broad access roads. Combined with an additional 300 miles of vehicle barriers, there are 608 total miles of barriers along the nearly 2,000-mile Southwest border that stretches from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas. That total falls just short of the 670 miles mandated by Congress in 2006.

Nowhere is the overhaul more evident than in Arizona, where today four-fifths of the border has pedestrian fences or vehicle barriers, up from about one-fifth three years ago.

For nearly eight miles to the east and 2 1/2 miles to the west of Nogales, towering steel fences and dirt and gravel roads cut across the desert floor like a white stripe across a yellow, green and brown canvas.

The new fencing bookends about 2 1/2 miles of steel landing-mat fence put up in the 1990s for a total of 13 miles of continuous fencing in the Nogales area.

Pedestrian fences and roads also stretch across 40-plus continuous miles of border in Cochise County from the foot of the Huachuca Mountains to east of Douglas with the only breaks in the washes and rivers.

The fencing covers seven miles around Sasabe, five-plus miles flanking Lukeville and 45 miles from San Luis east across the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range.

In addition to the 124 miles of pedestrian fences, there are 183 miles of vehicle barriers along Arizona's border, including most of the 75 miles along the Tohono O'odham Reservation, across most of the 88 miles of border across the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in Southwestern Arizona, and east of Douglas toward the New Mexico state line.

The new pedestrian fences — built mostly by private contractors — make the fences of the 1990s look weak.

Those fences, made of Army-surplus landing mat and put up by Border Patrol agents and the military, stand about 10 to 12 feet high and are easily scaled or cut through — and difficult to repair. Most look like old quilts today, a patchwork of welded pieces covering the breaches.

Most of the new fences are 15 feet or higher, made of double steel mesh or concrete-filled steel tubes, and are much more difficult to cut through, said White, the Border Patrol agent in charge in Nogales. There have been only two breaches to the new fencing at Nogales since last year, he said.

Homeland Security paid $166 million in 10 contracts for the construction of nearly 45 miles of pedestrian fences in Arizona in 2007-2008, information from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers shows. The per-mile cost ranged from $2.59 million for 7.5 miles of fence east of Nogales to $7.425 million for 2.08 miles west of Nogales.

White said using subcontractors to build fencing resulted in more effective barriers.

"They hit the ground running, have engineers troubleshooting. They have all the right equipment for the job. They are the professionals," he said.

The new and improved roads have also been invaluable in areas that were previously accessible to agents only by foot, ATV or horseback.

The roads also mean lower vehicle-maintenance costs and faster response and transport times, he said.

Blockade or speed bump?

East of the Lukeville port of entry in Mexico, an unpaved road runs parallel to a double steel mesh pedestrian fence.

On a recent visit, scouts could be seen driving back and forth along the road eyeing the movements of Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side. Shortly after an agent drove west toward the Lukeville, two taxis emerged from a cluster of homes and ranches in Mexico and drove east along the border on the dirt road. When they reached the end of the fence about three miles west of Lukeville, they stopped and dropped off about 10 people.

The group casually walked over the waist-high vehicle barriers and into the United States, fading into the sea of cactus and shrubs. Whether they succeeded in evading the Border Patrol is unknown, but they had no problem defeating the fence.

Smugglers staging the crossing of people or drugs is a daily occurrence near Soto's ranch.

Going around is just one tactic smugglers use, Soto said. They commonly cut through the mesh fence or use ladders to go over it.

"It doesn't do anything," Soto said in Spanish.

Lee Baiza, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument superintendent, says the verdict is still out on the five-plus miles of pedestrian fencing put up last year on the monument's southern border.

"The thing that amazes me is that they still bother to just cut through it," Baiza said. "It has deviated some traffic but not in totality the way I would have expected it to."

Glenn Spencer, who runs the non-governmental organization American Border Patrol from his 100 acres along the border west of the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area, says it depends on the type of fencing.

The 18-foot-high steel bollard fence that stretches from the San Pedro River across his ranch nearly six miles west to the foot of the Huachuca Mountains has completely stopped illegal immigration, Spencer said.

But a shorter steel mesh fence on the other side of the San Pedro that is easy to climb hasn't slowed smugglers and illegal border crossers much, he said. And he considers vehicle barriers useless for stopping people and gets annoyed when Homeland Security counts them in its total miles of fencing.

"It has to be tall enough, it has to be effectively designed," Spencer said.

The same bollard fencing Spencer raves about can also be found east of Nogales and in two stretches around Douglas. Variations of the bollard fencing are up west of Nogales, flanking Sasabe and east of Naco.

"It is the best investment we could make on our border," said Spencer, who flies the border in a small plane to track the fence construction. "We are going to be cutting back on the drugs entering the United States, criminals entering the United States, illegal aliens. We are going to cut down on Border Patrol costs."

By the numbers

Fencing along Arizona's 378-mile stretch of U.S.-Mexico border:

124

miles of pedestrian fencing

25

miles of pedestrian fencing as of September 2006

183

miles of vehicle barriers in Arizona

45

miles of vehicle barriers in Arizona as of September 2006

Source: U.S. Border Patrol

Costs of the new border fencing put up in 2007-2008:

$459.8 million

paid to private contractors to build 184.72 miles of pedestrian fences and vehicle barriers in the Tucson and Yuma sectors.

$166.3 million

paid to build 44.92 miles of pedestrian fencing, an average of $3.7 million per mile.

$293.4 million

paid to build 139.8 miles of vehicle barriers, an average of $2.099 million per mile.

$7.425 million

the cost per mile to build the most expensive stretch of pedestrian fence, 2.08 miles west of Nogales.

$2.59 million

the cost per mile to build the least expensive stretch of pedestrian fence, 7.5 miles of fence east of Nogales.

Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Types of pedestrian fencing:

Legacy, or landing mat, fencing

Put up in the 1990s by Border Patrol agents or military, it is Army-surplus steel landing mat that stands about 10 feet or higher. Found in downtown Nogales and Douglas.

Bollard fencing

12-to-18-foot-high, concrete-filled steel posts set a few inches apart. This is the most common of the new fences put up in the past two years. Found flanking Sasabe, Nogales and west of the San Pedro River.

Steel mesh

Double steel mesh panels mounted on rails and posts. Found flanking Lukeville and just west of Naco.

Vehicle barriers

Waist- or chest-high steel barriers designed to stop vehicles, not people. These use crisscrossed railroad rails. Post-on-rail barriers are exactly that, posts on rails. Bollard vehicle barriers are concrete-filled bollard tubes set at different heights.

http://www.azstarnet.com/news/284406.php

Smugglers cut border fence

Sierra Vista Herald
Febraury 7, 2009
By Jonathan Shacat

BISBEE — Smugglers recently removed two mesh panels from U.S.-Mexico border fencing located east of the San Pedro River, and Border Patrol officials have repaired them.

The precise location of these fence sections is near low-water crossing number 38, known as Gringo Wash.

The damage to one section was discovered on Jan. 28. Officials fixed it late last week. Officials noticed the damage on the other section last Monday and it was fixed this week.
Bill Odle, who owns land along the border near the San Pedro River, said the smugglers cut out the entire mesh fencing panels and then replaced them so it appeared they had not been tampered with.

He thinks they were moving vehicles across with the use of a small ramp, based on the large size of the opening and the presence of tracks on both sides of the border.

Mike Scioli, a public information officer for Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, said every 48 hours a team goes out and puts patches onto the fencing where it has been breached.

“Agents working in the field who notice anything like that make sure a report gets sent in and they relay it to that crew and they take care of it also,” he said.

The government decided to build fencing with the “eye-aesthetically pleasing” mesh material because “a lot of people said they didn’t want the fence because it blocked their view of Mexico,” Scioli said.

Also, he said, the mesh material “is hard to climb because the little squares are so small you can’t get fingers or a foot grip in them.” More importantly, he added, the Border Patrol’s camera systems can see through it.

The mesh is thin, however, making it relatively easy for someone to use a torch to cut through it. Not all sections of fencing in the area consist of the mesh material.

“We have a number of different styles throughout the sector,” Scioli said. “There is the bollard-style that is concrete filled. It goes about 4 to 5 feet into ground and is about 14 to 16 feet high.”

Odle said the fencing is clearly not stopping people. Not only do they climb over it, they also cut it open so they can travel through it.

Angela de Rocha, of Customs and Border Protection’s office of public affairs in Washington, D.C, said the fence is only one part of a three-element strategy, including fence, surveillance technology and increased Border Patrol manpower.

“The purpose of the fence is to slow illegal crossers down enough that the Border Patrol can catch them,” she said.

http://www.svherald.com/articles/2009/02/07/news/doc498d49489c32c913957932.txt

Ancient village found on U.S.-Mexico border

'Gateway community' uncovered during preparations for fence

Sierra Vista Herald
January 9, 2009

TUBAC — The construction of the fence along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2007 led to the find of a prehistoric village east of the San Pedro River.

Some of those findings were presented Thursday evening to the Tubac/Santa Cruz County Chapter of the Arizona Archaeological Society. Twenty people attended the event.“The San Pedro is a special place,” said archaeologist Maren Hopkins, the project director.

Hopkins said the village was probably the biggest data recovery project that she has directed. The 27-year-old has been digging for 10 years in many places in Arizona, New Mexico and Mexico.

Evidence found at the “Upper San Pedro Village” indicates that it was a crossroads, or a type of “gateway community,” said Hopkins, who works for Northland Research Inc., which has offices in Flagstaff, Tempe and Tucson.

“It’s sort of an area that’s on the periphery of a lot of other areas that we do understand,” Hopkins said. “It’s a peripheral site to the Tucson Basin … it’s peripheral to all these areas. So these people were kind of a mix of people. It was frontier then, just like it is now.”

The village is believed to have existed from around A.D. 700 to 1200, Hopkins said, based on ceramics analysis. There appear to be some Hohokam characteristics, but it is yet uncertain exactly who lived there.

Archaeologists found 23 pit houses, 14 possible pit houses, 97 thermal pits, a number of storage pits, five dog burials and 69 human burials. As is customary in this region, the human remains have all been repatriated to the Tohono O’Odham Indian Reservation.There was an interesting artifact found at the site that Hopkins had not seen before. She calls it a “stone jaw bone.” It has a serrated edge, and she firmly believes it was used for scraping animal hides. Several of these implements were found at the site, which also yielded “more deer bone than I’ve ever seen in my life,” she said.

Westland was contracted to do archaeological work for the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers and the U.S. Department Homeland Security so the agencies could comply with federal archaeological laws. In October 2007, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff pushed ahead with the fence, winning federal court approval of his waiving of environmental restrictions.

“It is a sensitive subject,” Hopkins said of the border politics.

She told the Tubac archaeology society how complicated her work was because of the numerous government and private agencies involved. Those included ranchers on the U.S. and Mexican sides, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and the Arizona National Guard, just to name a few.She described how one time “the No. 2 guy” from Homeland Security flew to the San Pedro River archaeological site in a Black Hawk helicopter and asked the scientists, “Are you OK?”

At that moment, some of the nearby Mexican ranchers were delivering a plateful of delicious tacos, which the archaeologists had become accustomed to. The Homeland Security official asked, “Are they bugging you?” The archaeologists answered, “No.”

Hopkins did say there was genuine concern for archaeologists’ safety when they were working in the notoriously-violent smuggling corridor of Altar Valley.

But, overall, the archaeologists had to deal with multiple jurisdictions and a lot of curious people. “We just had people around us all the time,” she said.

Mexican archaeologists were among the interested parties, and their American counterparts are collaborating with them as always, Hopkins said.

One restriction posed by the U.S. government was that the archaeologists could only dig 5 feet deep, because that was as far as they were digging for the fence’s footers. Below that depth, “The archaeology, I guarantee, keeps going,” Hopkins said.

On another axis, the archaeologists were allowed to dig to a limit of 60 feet wide. That dimension related to President Theodore Roosevelt’s 60-foot-wide easement running the length of the U.S.-Mexico border from California to Texas. The “Roosevelt Reservation” was created “for the purpose of homeland security,” Hopkins said.

This “stripping” method of archaeology, done mainly by backhoe, ultimately extended for three-tenths of a mile and excavated 7,500 tons of soil from three-fourths of an acre.

The site has been reburied. Hopkins has not been back there for many months.“There’s a fence there now,” she said.

Herald/Review City Editor Ted Morris can be reached at 515-4614 or by e-mail at cityeditor@svherald.com.