For some Texans on the border, more walls and patrols won't solve the immigration crisis

Public Radio International
August 13, 2014
by Jason Margolis

Scott Nicol, a college art teacher and sculptor, likes to bring people to walk the border wall in Hidalgo, Texas. On a windy day, we stroll along a path in the shadow of 18-foot-high iron bars. One of Nicol’s favorite pastimes is hunting for homemade wooden ladders.

“That’s how you get over the wall," says Nicol pointing at some ladders lying on the ground. "I mean that’s what they’re for. It takes $2 or $3 worth of hardware and nails to defeat a wall that cost $12 million a mile,” says Nicol.

That’s $12 million a mile for this section of wall — the average cost per mile across the border is closer to $4.5 million.

President Obama is asking for $3.7 billion to deal with the latest border crisis — tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children coming to the US border seeking asylum. House Republicans have countered with an offer of $694 million, with contingencies. The big one is that they want more border security.

That makes Nicol apoplectic. During our 30-minute stroll, we counted the Border Patrol jeeps. We found eight, as well as one ATV and a helicopter overhead. Texas Game Wardens also patrol the Rio Grande in speedboats mounted with machine guns.
 
“That makes me very nervous,” says Nicol. “There’s absolutely no reason or instance where you would be using that kind of artillery unless there’s a military invasion.”

Yet, more reinforcements are on the way. Texas Governor Rick Perry says he’s sending up to 1,000 National Guard troops to the border soon. Perry says they’re needed to stop drugs and criminals.

Nicol, who also does work with the Sierra Club, says the border wall became his issue for a simple reason: it just makes him angry. To him, it's too costly and divides habitat areas like a wildlife bird sanctuary on the river. He understands the need for border security, but thinks much of the wall's design simply doesn’t make sense. For example, as we’re walking along for nearly a mile, the wall stops.

“Obviously anybody that has traveled up from Central America is not going to be stopped by something that’s only 9/10th of a mile wide. They’ll just go around it,” says Nicol.

It works this way up and down the Rio Grande — there's the wall, then a gap for a few miles, then more wall.

But the chief patrol agent for the Rio Grande Valley, Kevin Oaks, says the wall isn’t as haphazard as Nicol makes it out to be.

“What it does is it slows the traffic down temporarily, so it gives the agents and whatever technology we employ a little more time to get activated,” says Oaks. The Border Patrol also has unmanned aerial vehicles — drones — that patrol more isolated stretches of the border.

Oaks admits that people can use a ladder to climb over the wall, or even tunnel under. But he says it’s all about striking a balance between what can be funded and what can be achieved.

“If you look at history, there’s no physical way that you can ever possibly, 100 percent secure the border. So you have to come up with a compromise, and that compromise is a low-risk border,” says Oaks. For him, that means safe border communities and a low flow of drugs and criminals coming across.

By many metrics, the investment is paying off — the border is the most secure it’s been in 40 years. The annual tab for immigration and border enforcement nationwide: $18 billion. The budget for just the US Border Patrol alone is closer to $3.5 billion annually.

Community activist Michael Seifert, who lives less than a mile from the border in Brownsville, says there are other costs for border residents, on both sides. Border Patrol agents have killed 19 people, some US citizens, but mostly Mexicans, in a recent two-and-a-half year period.

“And not a single one of those cases has been brought to a fitting conclusion — this is what happened, the agent was justified or not. They’re simply not pursued,” says Seifert.

Kevin Oaks says his agents aren’t acting with impunity. “Every allegation of misconduct is thoroughly investigated and adjudicated appropriately.” 
 
Oaks says the FBI and the Office of Inspector General oversee corruption and criminal charges lodged against Border Patrol. They also conduct internal investigations.

Scott Nicol says he's never had a problem with any agents directly and understands the vast majority are trained professionals just doing their jobs. Still, he doesn’t want more agents to deal with this latest border crisis. After all, he says, Central American children are turning themselves in, not sneaking into the US.

“The response from certain politicians is, ‘Send in the National Guard, build more walls,’” says Nicol. “They can’t get their heads around immigration, they can only think about it in terms of security.”

Nicol, as well other border residents, agree more resources are needed to deal with this latest border crisis. But they want money to ease the backlog in immigration courts and provide better services for the children, not to build more security.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-08-13/some-texans-border-more-walls-and-patrols-wont-solve-immigration-crisis

McAllen couple donates ranchland to help ocelots

The Monitor
July 27, 2014
Paula Ann Solis

The border fence running between Mexico and Texas has inadvertently blocked and damaged the Rio Grande Valley range of ocelots.

Urbanization and political boundaries pose a danger to this endangered cat and the future of wildlife. But a McAllen family has breathed new life into their survival by placing part of their land in the hands of an interested party, the United States government.
 Celebrated land stewards Karen and Phil Hunke worked for more than a decade to transform thousands of acres in Hidalgo County, known as Tecolote Ranch, into a sanctuary for endangered plants and animals such as the ocelot.
 In the Valley, where 95 percent of original Texas brush land has been cleared in the name of progress, their efforts are uncommon.
 “Karen and I are just really committed to helping people learn and educating them about how you can conserve land and not over graze,” Hunke said. “You can aid wildlife at the same time and have cattle and make it work together.”
 The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group, took note of their commitment and successful maintenance of critical land during land inventories, Hunke said.
 To take their progress one step further, the Hunkes sold 1,119 acres in June to the conservancy at a significantly reduced price, cutting their overall land value. But it was all in the name of nature and charity, Hunke said.
 The land is near the intersection of Willacy, Hidalgo and Kenedy counties.
 The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service acquired the land for $3 million with funds the Department of Homeland Security reserved to combat the negative impacts of the border fence’s construction.

http://m.themonitor.com/news/local/mcallen-couple-donates-ranchland-to-help-ocelots/article_3afde3fa-1525-11e4-8c8c-001a4bcf6878.html?mode=jqm

U.S. border fence skirts environmental review

Public Radio International - The World
August 12, 2013

It’s a clear, breezy morning on the scrubby hills overlooking the Tijuana River Valley south of San Diego.

Border Patrol jeeps cruise the dirt roads that run up and down the hills along the fence that marks the US-Mexico border. One drags a makeshift rake behind it to comb the road, so agents can later spot fresh footprints.

Mike McCoy, a 71-year-old veterinarian, has spent more than half his life working to protect the estuary formed where this river meets the Pacific Ocean.

He's heading down toward a place called Smuggler’s Gulch.

“This was probably the most difficult cut for them, and the most problematic cut for us,” McCoy said.

By “us” he means the activists and local land managers who fought against a massive earth-moving project that filled in the deep gulch and built a road across it in 2009.

“Before (the road) was going down these switchbacks,” he said. “And that took a long time."
Now, he says, Border Patrol agents just fly right through.

Starting in the 1990s, this place became ground zero in the battle to secure the border.

Back then, hundreds of illegal immigrants swarmed down the hills nightly from Tijuana. The Army Corps of Engineers built a 10-foot high fence, but it wasn’t much of a deterrent. So in 1996, Congress authorized a triple-layer fence to be built along 14 miles of the border.

McCoy and other environmentalists challenged the project based on federal environmental laws.
“The fence, to me, was a real threat to what might occur in the estuary,” he said.

Conservationists worried especially that filling in Smuggler’s Gulch would disrupt the flow of water and change the estuary’s ecology.

And they succeeded in slowing down construction for years.

Then came 9/11, and Congress ordered a massive expansion of the fence project–from 14 miles to 700 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Environmentalists challenged much of that as well, and again slowed construction in many spots.
Paul Ganster, of the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University, says that put the Department of Homeland Security in a tough spot.

“It was ordered by Congress to build so many miles of fence by a certain amount of time and they weren’t able to proceed to do this,” he said.

So Congress responded by giving DHS the right to waive all laws that could slow construction of the fence.

“And that removed a major tool of environmentalists and others opposed to the construction,” he said. “And it really removed a lot of the requirements for an open process, for public hearings, things that citizens and communities and environmentalists fought for, really from the '70s.”

Since then, DHS has waived dozens of federal and state laws to build new sections of the fence, some of it across protected land and habitat for endangered and threatened animals.

McCoy says deer and jaguar and Sonoran pronghorn are just some of the species being affected as the fences chop up their breeding grounds.

In some places, fencing has also contributed to flooding, erosion and destruction of habitat.
To date, about 650 miles of the nearly 2000-mile U.S.-Mexico border are fenced off.
But legislators concerned with border security say that’s still not enough.

Florida Republican Marco Rubio spoke on the Senate floor earlier this year in support of the border security component of the senate’s immigration bill. The bill called for hundreds of miles of more fencing, and it would give Homeland Security even more power to waive laws to build it.

“We have a sovereign right to protect out border. And we have a crisis on the southern border of the United States,” Rubio said at the time.

A handful of Democrats fought the waiver, led by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon.

Wyden told his colleagues, “Strengthening our immigration system should not come at the cost of throwing our environmental laws aside.”

And Wyden argued that the bill should at least include a sunset clause for the waiver.
But the environmental concerns didn’t get much traction. The bill passed the Senate by a wide margin.

Back in San Diego, Shawn Moran of the Border Patrol agents union says more fencing is a good thing. He says the San Diego fence has slowed illegal traffic here to a trickle. And adding hundreds of miles of new fencing probably would help by funneling illegal traffic into areas agents can control, he added.

“It’s not the answer to border security, but it is a primary tool that the border patrol has to slow down things,” he said.

Walking along the border, activist Mike McCoy admits that the environmental impact of all this fencing through the Tijuana River estuary hasn’t been “all bad.” Illegal crossers used to tromp through sensitive areas in the estuary. And he does understand the need for a secure border.

“I just think that we could’ve done better, biologically and ecologically, than what we did with this approach,” he said.

What really rankles McCoy is the supreme trump card held by one federal agency.

“It’s kind of my way or the highway type thing. And that’s not the way America worked to me. We all had a say in what went forward.”

The fate of the new environmental waiver, and the broader immigration bill that it’s part of, is uncertain. The House of Representatives has said it will write its own immigration reform bill, rather than take up the Senate’s bill.

But whatever happens in the Capitol, it’s likely that as the debate over immigration and border security gets louder, environmental concerns will remain barely a whisper.

http://www.pri.org/stories/science/environment/u-s-border-fence-skirts-environmental-review-14659.html

Sierra Club: More border walls is not the answer

Rio Grande Guardian June 22, 2013 by Steve Taylor HIDALGO, June 22 - The Sierra Club has denounced plans to build hundreds of miles of additional border walls, saying the only place left to add more barriers is through wildlife refuges and private property along the Rio Grande in Texas. In a statement, the group said America and its environment can’t afford another “Border Splurge.” So far, six hundred miles of walls have been built along the U.S.-Mexico border. “What we’ve learned,” the Sierra Club states, “is that that these barriers do not stop immigration – they only devastate wildlife and habitat while bisecting communities and costing taxpayers millions of dollars per mile.” Plans to build more border walls came via an amendment to the Senate immigration reform legislation authored by Republican U.S. Sens. John Hoeven of North Dakota and Bob Corker of Tennessee. The amendment, which has the backing of the so-called Gang of Eight U.S. senators, would require the construction of hundreds of miles of border walls, to be added to the existing 651 miles of fencing already built, in addition to a near doubling of the U.S Border Patrol by adding 20,000 agents. There would also be a lot more towers, cameras, sensors and drones. The additional border security could cost $48 billion over ten years. Dan Millis, of the Sierra Club Borderlands team, said the Sierra Club “strongly opposes this reckless and unrealistic proposal that would not only destroy habitat, cut off wildlife migration corridors and cause flooding, but also waste tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on technology we know has little impact on fixing our immigration system.” Millis pointed out that last year the U.S. government spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement - more than all other federal law enforcement combined. “Our borderlands are already overrun with excessive numbers of Border Patrol vehicles, agents, towers and buildings. We have more than 650 miles of border fence that only serve to bisect communities and devastate the borderlands environment. We already have a border splurge – we don’t need another one,” Millis said. Millis said the proposed doubling of the Border Patrol is precisely that, another border splurge. “While cutting basic services and environmental protections, they want to waste billions more building more fences. The truth is the only place left to build more fences is through wildlife refuges and private property along the Rio Grande in Texas, where Homeland Security estimates future wall construction projects to cost $9.4 million per mile. That means spending billions of dollars on hundreds of miles of fence that won’t do what they want it to do,” Millis said. “Our communities, our wildlife, and our borderlands can’t afford another border splurge, and neither can American taxpayers.” Another group that has come out strongly against the Corker-Hoeven amendment is CAMBIO, which stands for Campaign for an Accountable, Moral and Balanced Immigration Overhaul. Its members include the Border Network for Human Rights, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, the ACLU of New Mexico Regional Center for Border Rights, and the Northern Borders Coalition. The group released the following joint statement in united opposition to the negotiated Senate deal: “This is a bad deal for U.S. taxpayers, but especially for those that live and work in the border region. While the flow of migration is at a historic low, excessive enforcement remains unchecked and unaccountable to communities in which Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection operates. This proposal to increase enforcement without checks and balances is an example of excessive and wasteful government spending and represents an unnecessary expansion of the federal government's authority. “We know the effects that these provisions will have on the daily lives of all border residents. Our communities have endured the painful reality of unchecked and unaccountable enforcement operations, which have led to decreased civil liberties and civil rights protections, interruption of commerce and trade, constant surveillance in our neighborhoods, excessive and deadly use of force by Border Patrol agents, and the outright militarization of border communities. The senators need to be reminded that border communities are still part of this nation and that there should be no further militarization of our neighborhoods. In fact, there has been an immediate and overwhelming response from mayors, local elected officials, law enforcement leaders and faith leaders along the border in opposition to the proposal. “As border communities, we stand united in our resounding rejection of the Hoeven-Corker deal and urge the Senate to include accountability and oversight mechanisms to the already massive presence of border agents in our communities. This includes mandating lapel cameras for border agents, providing subpoena power to the DHS Border Oversight Task Force, applying geographic limits on warrantless Border Patrol stops in the southern border, and directing any increase in personnel to ports of entry where they are needed to facilitate trade that is fueling our economies. “The Hoeven-Corker proposal to increase the number of Border Patrol, add additional fencing, and spend trillions in technology is expensive, extreme and wasteful, particularly at a time when we need to improve our schools, fix our roads, and grow our economy. It is an assault on our system of checks and balances and seriously threatens the quality of life of border residents. Overhauling the nation's immigration process is urgently necessary, but this should not be done without proper consultation with those communities who must live with the effects of poorly thought-out policy. We cannot not remain silent as politicians on both sides of the aisle continue to treat border communities as an endlessly expendable trade-off for immigration reform.” Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas was one of the elected officials to welcome members of the Border Network for Human Rights when they participated in a caravan for immigration reform in Laredo on Tuesday. This week, Salinas has been in Las Vegas for the Conference of Mayors’ summer meeting. Salinas offered a resolution in support of comprehensive immigration reform that was approved by both the Conference of Mayors' Immigration Reform Task Force and its Criminal and Social Justice Committee. This committee is chaired by Houston Mayor Annise D. Parker. “I am grateful to Mayor Parker for carrying the resolution through her committee and I am prepared to carry the resolution on the floor of the Conference on Monday,” Salinas said. “Immigration reform is needed now more than ever, and I am pleased that the Congress and the GAO have now documented the Immigration Reform is not only the right thing to do, it will provide this nation a needed economic stimulus.” Vice President Joe Biden spoke about immigration reform at the Conference of Mayors event. “The math is pretty simple, if you bring people out of the shadows and you give them a start they add to the tax base. They start investing in the communities where they live and they begin to lay down roots,” Biden said. Salinas was pleased with the remarks Biden made. “Vice President Biden referenced research that documented that the majority of small business that are started today are started by immigrants. But, more than the research, I was pleased that the Conference of Mayors debuted a documentary on the DREAMERs. You don't need research to see the desire in those young people's eyes,” Salinas said. http://www.riograndeguardian.com/green_story.asp?story_no=25#.UcZRCFtF_7s.facebook

South Texas border fence in limbo amid flooding, wildlife worries

E & E News
January 23, 2013
by April Reese

In south Texas, where the Rio Grande divides the United States from Mexico, three of the last remaining sections of border fence -- approved more than five years ago -- remain unbuilt.

Unlike many existing sections, those in limbo would be constructed within the floodplain. They would stretch a total of 7 miles and skim the southern edge of three Texas towns -- Roma, Rio Grande and Los Ebanos.

Mexican officials, border town mayors, environmental groups, residents and some congressional leaders remain concerned that those projects could potentially push Rio Grande floodwaters into Mexican towns and block wildlife corridors.

After languishing on the back burner for several years, the projects have advanced recently after receiving a needed stamp of approval from an international governmental body. But as many opponents have made clear, the fence Congress authorized in 2006 will not be completed without a major fight.

"I've lived here all my life," said Rio Grande City Mayor Ruben Villarreal, who has governed the city for five years. "The minute you manipulate anything along the river, it affects you, and how that will affect the community is a big concern. It's going to obstruct the natural flow of the water and obstruct wildlife."

If the sections in question are constructed, local officials and residents fear debris will build up along the fence, causing severe flooding and erosion.

At first, officials with the International Boundary Water Commission (IBWC), created to address water-related issues along the border, shared those concerns. But after alterations to the original plans, the agency has changed its mind, said Sally Spener, a foreign affairs officer with the United States' section of the IBWC, or the USIBWC.

"There was a new design that they came up with that did not cause a prohibitive obstruction," Spener said, referring to the Department of Homeland Security, which is charged with implementing the projects. "In other words, it wasn't a solid fence. It was a different design back in 2008."

The fence could also block wildlife from key migration corridors, environmental groups say.

Scott Nichols, who works for the Sierra Club's Borderlands Project and lives in the border town of McAllen, Texas, worries about the fence's impact on rare and endangered species, including the ocelot, whose population has dropped to about 100 breeding animals. If the fence is built, that will be one more barrier hemming in wildlife -- along with roads, buildings and other fencing.

The Department of Homeland Security has already constructed fence segments through prime wildlife areas, including the Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area and the South Texas Refuge Complex, over the objections of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agencies, along with conservation groups, have worked for decades to purchase and restore habitat in the lower Rio Grande Valley, and the new fencing could severely undermine those efforts, Nichols and other conservationists say.

Villarreal said DHS and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) haven't paid enough attention to what the people who live along the border want.

"At some point, stop asking Washington and start asking border residents, and you'll find a solution," he said, "because we live on the river."

In the end, opponents' best hope of killing the fence in south Texas may be the congressional funding crunch. CBP says it currently does not have the money to pursue the project.

"There is no funding to build any additional fence at this time," said Bill Brooks, a spokesman for CBP's south Texas office. But many locals worry the money will be found in the next few years.

Of rivers and boundaries

Concerns about the fence date back to the late 2000s. In 2008, the IBWC, a binational government agency that deals with water-related border issues, warned DHS that the fence segments in Rio Grande City, Roma and Los Ebanos could potentially cause flooding and shift the international boundary.

Under a 1970 boundary treaty, IBWC -- both the agency's Mexican section and the U.S. section -- must ensure that projects built in the Rio Grande floodplain do not obstruct or deflect the river's flows or exacerbate flooding. In particular, IBWC officials worried that during rainstorms, debris would build up against the fence and turn it into a dam of sorts, diverting flows into Mexican communities (Land Letter, March 27, 2008).
But after consultants analyzing the potential effects of the fence on river flows revised their original model, USIBWC dropped their concerns.

The Mexican section of IBWC, however, remained unconvinced.

"The location, alignment and design of the proposed fence represent a clear obstruction of the Rio Grande hydraulic area, since in the towns of Rio Grande City and Roma, Texas, the fence would occupy nearly all of the hydraulic area on the U.S. side, causing deflection of flows toward the Mexican side," wrote Luis Antonio Rascon Mendoza, principal engineer for IBWC-Mexico, in a Dec. 13, 2011, letter to the USIBWC.

The fence would obstruct 60 to 70 percent of the hydraulic area, and considering the amount of debris that could pile up against the barrier, "the fence constitutes a serious obstruction and deflection of the Rio Grande flows toward Mexico," he wrote.

But last year, engineers for the USIBWC cleared the way for the project to proceed, concluding that the fence would not violate the 1970 boundary treaty.

"After an in-depth and thorough review, the USIBWC has concluded that the proposed fence project(s) will not cause significant deflection or obstruction of ... flood flows of the Rio Grande," USIBWC engineer John Merino wrote in a Feb. 3, 2012, letter responding to the concerns of the Mexican section of IBWC.

The fence would be constructed of 6-inch vertical bollard posts with 4-inch spaces in between. Computer models show that the amount of water that would be directed into Mexico by the fence is "within the threshold limits," partly because some of the flow would pass through the fence, Merino said.

Based on that information, the USIBWC notified the Department of Homeland Security that it had no objection to the three fence projects -- a necessary step for DHS to move forward.

Multiple attempts to reach a DHS representative familiar with the projects garnered no response. DHS has told IBWC it would come up with a plan to keep debris from piling up against the fence during storms.

It is unclear whether the Mexican section of IBWC remains concerned about the project. In a brief phone conversation, Mendoza referred an inquiry from Greenwire about Mexico's position on the project to a spokesperson, who did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication.

Despite the USIBWC's assurances, local opposition in the United States remains strong. At a meeting held by USIBWC in Rio Grande City late last summer, the majority of the crowd of residents and local officials questioned the agency's conclusions.

"How can you really tell us it's going to work 100 percent?" said Aleida Garcia, of Los Ebanos, a small community that lies within the floodplain, according to an Associated Press account of the Aug. 29, 2012, meeting. "Because we're talking about people, communities, families."

Jose Nuñez, supervisory civil engineer with USIBWC, said in response that "whether the fence is there or not, you're still in the floodplain," according to AP. He reiterated that the computer model used by the agency's engineers to analyze the project's hydrologic effects suggests that the fence will not create a significant obstruction.

The fence is unpopular in other areas of Texas, as well. In places where CBP tried to avoid building in the floodplain, the new 18-foot barrier has cut off landowners from some of their private property, including farmland. Some landowners have sued over DHS's use of eminent domain to allow construction through private property.

Securing the border?

The fence projects in limbo were authorized as part of a larger border reinforcement effort mandated under the Secure Fence Act of 2006. It called for construction of a total of about 700 miles of fence along sections of the U.S.-Mexico border, which spans 1,954 miles from Texas to California. The barrier was needed to "make the border more secure," President George W. Bush said in signing the legislation into law on Oct. 26, 2006.

Around the time the Secure Fence Act was passed, Congress also gave its stamp of approval to the Real ID Act, which allowed more than 30 environmental and cultural laws to be waived by the DHS secretary to expedite construction of the ambitious project. But the south Texas projects still have to comply with international treaties governing actions along the section of the Rio Grande that serves as the border there.

Critics maintain that in south Texas, there is no need for the fence in the first place. Nichols of the Sierra Club points to a June 2008 document drafted to address community concerns as evidence that the CBP itself believes the fence projects planned for south Texas would be overkill. CPB said in the document that at that time, it was able to "effectively control" that section of the border with boots on the ground.

But the agency went on to say it believed further reinforcements would be necessary if illegal activity increased in the Rio Grande Valley sector.

The number of apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley actually dropped in the ensuing years, however.

According to data provided by CBP, apprehension of illegal border crossers has decreased almost every year since 2008. Apprehensions in the Rio Grande sector went from 134,186 in fiscal 2005 to 59,243 in fiscal 2011.
Some local officials, including Mayor Villarreal and U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), whose district includes some of the area slated for the projects, have called for alternatives to the fence to secure the area, primarily by expanding the law enforcement presence.

"Let's get more money for our local sheriffs and police," Cuellar said in a video posted on his website after a DHS hearing on border security.

Villarreal, however, remains convinced the fence will be built within the next few years.

"I think we'll have to deal with the strong possibility that we'll have a fence to contend with," he said.

Environmentalists: Border fence putting Arizona pronghorns in peril

Arizona Republic
January 24, 2013
by Bob Ortega

PHOENIX -- The land where the antelope play, where Arizona meets Mexico, has been divided in recent years by taller and longer border fences.

 

They are meant to keep out or slow undocumented migrants and drug smugglers coming north from Mexico, but environmentalists say they're also helping drive two southeastern Arizona pronghorn antelope herds to the brink of dying out.

 

Environmentalists say the inability of the pronghorn — and other wildlife — to range freely across southern Arizona and northern Mexico has contributed to dramatic declines in the population of what are known as the San Rafael and Sonoita herds. From 122 animals identified in a 2005 count, the herds' numbers fell to 26 in a survey last year, according to the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

The San Rafael herd is down to an estimated eight animals, and the Sonoita herd is down to an estimated 18.

 

While the number of animals spotted can depend on weather conditions and other factors, Game and Fish doesn't consider either herd sustainable, and the agency plans to capture and transplant enough animals from the Chino Valley area, north of Prescott, to reinvigorate them.

 

But there are questions about whether the transplants will work if border fences and other pressures on the herds go unchanged.

 

Dan Millis, borderlands program coordinator for the Sierra Club, said he suspects not. However, John Millican, a project manager with the Arizona Antelope Foundation, said he thinks the border fence may actually have protected the few pronghorn that are left from being shot by poachers in northern Mexico.

 

Millican and Millis agree that better studies would help make the fence's impact clear.

 

Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) aren't really antelope, which are found only in Africa and Asia. However, they're commonly called pronghorn antelope because they resemble true antelope in behavior and appearance. The pronghorn is the only surviving species of the antilocapridae family. They're considered the second-fastest land animal in the world, after the cheetah, with a top speed of more than 60 mph.

 

Environmental reviews skipped

 

After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Bush administration launched a massive expansion of the border wall and the Border Patrol. In 2006, Congress adopted the Secure Fence Act, and the Department of Homeland Security began contracting to build or reinforce fences in key areas along the U.S.-Mexican border, including in Arizona. Between the budget years 2008 and 2011, Customs and Border Protection spent $1.2 billion to build nearly 300 miles of fencing and roads along the U.S.-Mexican border, including areas around the Huachuca Mountains where the two pronghorn herds live.

 

To get that fencing up quickly, the Bush administration issued waivers of environmental- and endangered-species-protection laws and scrapped the environmental-impact studies and reviews that normally would have been required.

 

"We wish we had more scientific studies to point to," Millis said, "but the Department of Homeland Security has a poor environmental record. Borderwide, there's been very little funding for studies and habitat restoration and little of the due diligence that needs to be done."

 

Customs and Border Protection signed an agreement in 2009 with the Department of the Interior to fund up to $50 million in studies and projects along the border. The following year, the agencies launched $6.8 million in studies and projects along the Southwestern border. These included building a fish barrier in the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, restoring habitat for long-nosed bats in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and surveying and monitoring jaguars in southern Arizona.

Customs officials couldn't immediately identify further spending on border mitigation efforts.

 

Several studies that have been completed — on species such as the desert bighorn sheep in California and the cactus ferruginous pygmy owl — show that the habitats the animals need to thrive have been further fragmented. The chief causes are habitat loss due to development, habitat change from invasive plant species, the fences, the new roads along the fences and the increased Border Patrol presence.

 

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has led a decadelong multiagency project focusing on Arizona’s other southern corner, near Yuma, where the population of the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, a subspecies, has rebounded from 21 animals in the wild 10 years ago to more than 100 today. In addition, there are 125 more in breeding pens near Ajo, said Jim Paxon, chief of information for the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

Customs and Border Protection declined to discuss mitigation efforts in southeastern Arizona, but pointed, in a written statement, to the recovery efforts for the Sonoran pronghorn as “an example of our commitment.” The statement added that the agency “is fully engaged in efforts that consider the environment as we work to secure our nation’s border.”

Moving forward

Game and Fish tried twice — unsuccessfully — last winter to capture pronghorn near Chino Valley, using a quarter-mile-wide V-shaped trap leading to a corral, Paxon said. Officials decided against using a helicopter with a net gun because the mortality rate for the animals can run to 20 percent, vs. 3 to 4 percent using the corral traps, he said.

The captures have been postponed until next year, said Amber Munig, big-game supervisor for Game and Fish. Because the herd there spends much of its time on federal lands, the delay gives Game and Fish time to do a survey and gain permission from the federal Bureau of Land Management.

Munig said their goal is to transplant enough animals to boost the San Rafael and Sonoita herds up to at least 50 pronghorn each.

Munig said that while she couldn’t speak to the impact of the border fence, “We are looking at habitat issues and fragmentation in that area within Arizona.” The department has been working for years with other state and federal agencies, the Arizona Antelope Foundation and local ranchers to restore habitat in the areas used by the two herds, removing invasive species such as cheatgrass and juniper that squeeze out the native plants the pronghorn eat, she said.

Millican, who worked for 30 years for Game and Fish before joining the antelope foundation, said tackling another kind of fencing also has been key to connecting the fragmented areas where the pronghorn live. Arizona’s range lands are crisscrossed with barbed wire, old and new. That’s an issue for pronghorn, which shy from roads and, though fast, are not good jumpers, Millican said.

“Even when they’re really pressured, they prefer to go under a fence,” he said. But the lowest strand of older fencing, typically 6 to 8 inches off the ground, doesn’t give them enough clearance. So a major focus is working with landowners to replace the lowest strand of barbed wire with smooth wire 16 to 18 inches off the ground, which will keep livestock in but let the pronghorn through.

Millican agrees with the Sierra Club’s Millis that the border fence causes issues with other species moving back and forth. For the pronghorn, though, he said, “We have protections in the U.S.; there aren’t a lot of protections on the Mexican side.”

He said he’s confident that with proper habitat management on the U.S. side, the border fence won’t stop the herds from thriving again.

Millis, meanwhile, argues that other agencies and groups shy away from criticizing the Department of Homeland Security because “people don’t want to mess around with security issues.”

But he said there’s no question that the border walls harm the environment, “and now Arizonans are stuck with the costs of cleaning up the mess.”

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/20130111arizona-pronghorns-environmentalists-border-fence-peril.html

Sonoran pronghorn threatened by water issues, coalition says

Arizona Daily Star / Conkite News Service
November 16, 2012
by Andrew Bovin

WASHINGTON - A new report lists the endangered Sonoran pronghorn as one of the species most threatened by water problems across the nation.

The pronghorn was one of 17 species identified Wednesday by the Endangered Species Coalition as threatened by water-quality issues or a lack of water in 10 different watersheds.

For pronghorns, which live in the Sonoran Desert between Southwest Arizona and northern Mexico, problems include a lack of rainfall, water-quality problems from industrial and agricultural runoff and habitat damage from Border Patrol activities, among other factors, the report said.

Leda Huta, the coalition's executive director, said the timing and duration of rainfall in the desert is vital for the pronghorn's survival for several reasons.

"It's not just water, but also what they're eating," Huta said. "Without water, they're not going to have food."

Another problem is off-road activity by Border Patrol agents. That damages vegetation that the herds graze on, said Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that make up the coalition.

"It changes the nature of the area," Curry said of border activities, pointing out that the border fence divides pronghorn herds between the U.S. and Mexico.

"The fence is certainly a problem because it separates the population in Mexico and the population in the U.S.," Curry said.

But the Border Patrol challenged that claim, saying it works to protect the environment while doing its job of protecting the border.

"The preservation of our valuable natural and cultural resources is of great importance to Customs and Border Protection, and we are fully engaged in efforts that consider the environment as we work to secure our nation's borders," the agency said in a written statement Wednesday.

The statement said the agency's work in the Barry M. Goldwater Range in Arizona, where it "has funded mitigation and recovery efforts for the endangered Sonoran pronghorn, is an example of our commitment" to the environment.

The report, "Water Woes: How dams, diversions, dirty water and drought put America's wildlife at risk," is the latest by the coalition, which releases a report every year listing areas that are at greatest danger from a different environmental threat.

Environmental groups nominate species that are reviewed by scientists, who put together a final list. Huta said the coalition chose species that "aren't a lost cause," where human changes could alter the situation.

"They wanted species where we can highlight what can be done," Huta said.

She said people can help by cutting water use and reducing their carbon footprint, which she said contributes to global warming, which can lead to drought.

Pronghorns were listed as an endangered species in 1967. Officials estimate that there are only about 500 in the wild, about 100 of which are on the U.S. side of the border.

http://azstarnet.com/news/state-and-regional/sonoran-pronghorn-threatened-by-water-issues-coalition-says/article_523e99c9-80c6-53b6-8579-fb838bf256e5.html

A Barrier for South Texas Wildlife

New York Times
October 4, 2012
by Melissa Gaskill

A line of 18-foot-high steel posts spaced four inches apart flank the entrance of part of one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the United States, and one of the most endangered. Bifurcated by the fence is the Nature Conservancy’s Southmost Preserve near Brownsvillle, Tex., whose threatened species include the Southern yellow bat, the Texas tortoise and the ocelot, an endangered cat whose estimated American population is under 50. One of the few remaining stands of native sable palms in the United States grow there as well.

The posts are part of a 70-mile “pedestrian barrier” between Falcon Dam and the Gulf of Mexico that was built to deter illegal immigration and drug trafficking. It lies anywhere from hundreds of yards to several miles north of the border. Before construction started in 2009, experts expressed concern about the effects of the fence on so-called wildlife corridors in the Rio Grande Valley. Now they are taking stock of the impacts.

“All wildlife roam along corridors,” said Laura Huffman, director of the Texas branch of the Nature Conservancy. “These are nature’s highways. Any time you put an obstacle in a highway, it’s going to affect mobility, the ability of animals to move back and forth.”

At the Southmost Preserve, the bottom of the fence is pierced by 8-by-11-inch openings every 500 feet.These aren’t large enough for many animals, biologists say, nor were they positioned on the basis of existing data on wildlife corridors.

“Smaller animals – young coyotes, weasels, jackrabbits – can get through the holes, but larger animals can’t,” Ms. Huffman said. “The wall seems to have caused changes to movement patterns of many wildlife. We’re seeing tracks of deer and javelina where we weren’t before. I suspect they are having to follow along the fence to attempt crossings.”

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service has used cameras and collars to monitor bobcats in the Rio Grande Valley for more than 12 years. So far it has no evidence that bobcats are using the openings.
Ms. Huffman said the wall also seems to have changed some animals’ movement patterns. “We’re seeing tracks of deer and javelina where we weren’t before,” she said. “I suspect they are having to follow along the fence to attempt crossings.”

For the ocelot and the jaguarundi, another small cat, interbreeding between populations on both sides of the Rio Grande river is considered ciritical to maintaining genetic diversity.

Officials at the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, which spans 90,000 acres in 115 separate units, have also expressed concern about the barrier’s effect on an already fragmented landscape.

“I don’t think the openings are effective — nobody does,” said Kelly McDowell, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s refuge supervisor for Oklahoma and Texas. She said it was unlikely that ocelots would even find them. “This is a heavy forest-dwelling species that stays in cover, and you’re talking about an area that is cleared out with roads on both sides,” she said. “As a wildlife biologist, I can’t say there is any likelihood that the openings will maintain the connectivity that we think a species like ocelot needs.”

When the barrier went up, Maxwell Pons, the Southmost Preserve’s manager, sprayed fox urine around the openings to help animals find them. But not all species would pick up on the scent, he said.

The barrier also bisects the Anacua Unit of the Texas Parks and Wildlife department’s Las Palomas Wildlife Management Area, isolating 48 acres on its south side. “The fence limits the travel of larger animals,” said the department’s regional director, Len Polasek. “It also prevents animals from getting to the river for water.”

When construction got under way, the department’s biologists identified species likely to be affected by the barrier; among them were 10 plants and animals on federal and state endangered lists, 23 on the state’s threatened list, and dozens of species of concern.

“The border fence and roads associated with it reduce ability of animals to move on the landscape,” said Jon Beckmann, a scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society. “That isolates populations, which reduces genetic variation.”

Some sections of barrier in the Lower Rio Grand Valley are solid concrete walls intended to retain floodwaters, increasing the possibility that wildlife could be trapped in high water, environmentalists also point out. Even the post-style barrier can worsen flooding by trapping debris.

Mr. Beckmann said that many animals would be deterred from crossing anyway by the increased lighting and the vehicles of border guards and others traveling along the line of posts.

Mr. Pons and Ms. Huffman also worry what will happen to the Southmost Preserve’s native plant nursery, which has provided 70,000 seedlings of 16 trees and scrub to help restore native landscapes. “A lot of people had worked hard and put together a pretty remarkable mosaic of lands protected by state, federal and local agencies and organizations,” Ms. Huffman said.

Several studies support environmentalists’ arguments about the potentially destructive effect of the barriers. A 2009 study in the journal Conservation Biology suggested that the barrier would disrupt movement and distribution of ferruginous pygmy-owls, bighorn sheep and similar species. Another by scientists from the University of Texas and Yale identified three regions where wildlife was most at risk from pedestrian barriers: coastal California, Arizona’s Madrean Sky Island Archipelago and the Rio Grande Valley. (The barriers, mandated by the Secure Fence Act of 2006, extend intermittently across 650 miles of the border, from California to Texas.)

Still, Mr. Beckmann of the Wildlife Conservation Society says he remains optimistic that a solution will be found as the impacts are further documented. “If we get the right constituents together, we can address national security concerns and maintain functioning ecosystems at the same time,” he said. “It can be done. It’s just whether we as a nation decide it is something we want to do.”

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/a-barrier-for-south-texas-wildlife/

The Border Effect

The American Prospect
September 18, 2012
by Frank Clifford

For the aid workers who found 14-year-old Josseline Jamileth Hernández Quinteros in the Arizona desert, it is hardest to forget the little things, the beaded bracelet around a tiny wrist, the bright green sneakers, the pink-lined jacket, and the sweatpants with the word “Hollywood” across the backside. She was a wisp of a girl, barely 5 feet and 100 pounds, no match for the rough terrain or subfreezing temperatures.

No one can say for sure that Josseline died because of heightened security measures along the U.S. border with Mexico. Yet, to the volunteers who found her lying under a bush, her head resting on a rock in an unnamed creek bed, Josseline’s death was a predictable consequence of American policy, in particular, the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which mandated construction of enough fencing to cover about one-third of the U.S.–Mexico border across California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The goal was to foil unlawful entries, especially by drug dealers and terrorists. Josseline was neither. A native of El Salvador, she was on the last leg of a 2,000-mile quest to reunite with her mother. She was, nonetheless, an illegal alien.

Josseline and her ten-year-old brother were among thousands of children who head north from Mexico unaccompanied by parents or relatives. The two were with a group of adults that had entered the U.S. near Sasabe, Arizona, probably through an unfenced area. The gaps in the fence are as strategically positioned as the fence itself, in this case routing Josseline’s group through the Tumacacori wilderness, a spiny, mountainous badland that poses a challenge to the most experienced hikers. Spanish soldiers had a name for places like this, El Despoblado, the emptiness.

Josseline’s group had been walking two days north of the border when the girl became violently ill. She insisted that her brother continue without her. What happened to her after that is a mystery. Dan Millis, a staff member of the Tucson office of the Sierra Club, came upon her body while he and other volunteers were putting out containers of water for thirsty migrants. By then Josseline had been separated from her group for several weeks. Her brother had been reunited with the family in California, and they had reported that she was missing, according to writer Margaret Regan who covered the story for the Tucson Citizen. It was winter and cold enough for snow to spot the Arizona mountainsides. Josseline’s weakened condition probably made her susceptible to hypothermia. It is tempting to think that such a death is relatively painless, but dying of exposure isn’t a matter of fading dreamily into a coma. Death by cold typically advances slowly from violent shivering to loss of motor skills. Victims become disoriented and often lose the ability to act rationally. With nighttime temperatures hovering around freezing, Josseline had taken off her shoes and both of the jackets she had been wearing. Once the body’s temperature approaches 90 degrees, the shivering may become convulsive, seizure-like. As the body temperature continues to drop, the victim loses consciousness. Breathing becomes irregular, signaling the onset of pulmonary edema and ultimately respiratory and cardiac failure.

In another era, Josseline’s death might have engraved itself on our imagination, like the missing kids whose faces were reproduced on milk cartons. As an illegal, though, Josseline stands little chance of achieving a martyr’s place in a society inclined to accord her a status once reserved for bastards. But if she is not to be remembered as an innocent victim of a merciless law, how should Josseline and others like her be remembered? As collateral damage? As criminals? Many won’t be remembered at all, their unidentifiable remains as desiccated as the bones of wild animals that have perished from the same harsh conditions. The naturalist Craig Childs, who has spent much of his life combing deserts of the Southwest for the half-buried tools, utensils, and other grave markers of the Paleo-Indians, describes the land as a vast cemetery: “It changes a place to know that it still has physical ancestry. … You feel the oldness in the ground. … I thought that if there were such things as ghosts, I was stirring them by passing through here.”

Since the early 1990s, when the first section of the modern border fence was built, we have reconsecrated the ground, increasing the population of the dead by about 6,000. As the fence and other defensive measures have made the arduous crossing even harder, the mortality rate has risen. By 2009, the risk of dying while crossing the border in Arizona was 17 times greater than it was a decade earlier, according to one analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, and since 2009, the mortality rate has nearly doubled. About 10 percent of the fatalities are children. Along Arizona’s border with Mexico, that can mean 18 to 25 children die each year. The body count is at best an educated guess, since many of the missing have never been found. We know more about the prehistoric dead than some of the more recent casualties whose only markers are cast-off clothing and empty water bottles.

Seen from a distance, the border fence is a tantalizing mirage, a piece of land art in the tradition of the Spiral Jetty or The Lightning Field, its concrete supports and steel-mesh panels rendered immaterial like a long, hard road that seems to liquefy in the harsh light. Up close, it’s more imposing, the apotheosis of a junkyard fence. In the history of cross-border insults, it ranks with Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the U.S. government’s Harmon Doctrine denying Mexico’s right to water from the Rio Grande or Colorado River. Only, in this case, injuries have been inflicted on the culture, commerce, and environment on both sides of the border. Design flaws in the fence have caused floods that cost lives and resulted in several million dollars of damage to homes and businesses in Arizona and Mexico. Mountains in one California wilderness were dynamited to make way for the fence. In Texas, private property has been seized, elsewhere ranches trashed, and everywhere wildlife habitat damaged and ancient migration routes blocked.

Border fortifications are likely to remain in place and even grow if many in Washington have their way. Under legislation that has passed the House, the authority of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Border Patrol would be vastly expanded. The effects on people’s livelihoods, on topography, and on natural resources would be felt across an area larger than New England. The push for even more security is due in part to people’s misperception of what the fence is supposed to accomplish. Its apparent fragility is not a mirage, as evidenced by the ladders, the 149 tunnels, and the holes in the mesh panels that make long stretches of the fence look like a patchwork quilt. In 2010 alone, more than 4,000 holes were cut. Yet it was never meant to be an impenetrable barrier. Don’t mistake the fence for something it isn’t, then–Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News five years ago: “I think the fence has come to assume a certain kind of symbolic significance, which should not obscure the fact [that sealing off the borders] is a much more complicated problem.”

All of the bluster during the Republican primary about building a double fence (Michele Bachmann), electrifying it (Herman Cain), or extending it the entire length of the 1,950-mile border (Mitt Romney) missed the point. The fence is simply one component in the militarization of the border, a $90 billion project that marshaled thousands of Border Patrol agents and National Guard, deployed manned aircraft and aerial drones, established military-style bases and a network of radio-transmission towers, and carved thousands of miles of new roads in national parks and wildlife refuges. In the end, it is a system quite different from what was originally envisioned. It is designed less to stop people from crossing the border illegally than to apprehend them once they have crossed; it slows them down and makes them easier to catch once they are in the United States.

The strategy is comparable to football’s prevent defense, in which the team playing defense doesn’t attempt to stop its opponents from crossing the 50-yard line but concentrates its efforts on preventing a touchdown. “A speed bump in the desert” is the way one Border Patrol official describes the fence. The Government Accountability Office reported in May that the strategy assumes that nearly 90 percent of apprehensions are going to be made after people have entered the country illegally. The Border Patrol put it this way: “Illegal traffic will be deterred or forced over more hostile terrain less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.” The fence funnels people into some of the roughest country along the border, into places like the Tumacacori wilderness, Josseline’s final resting place. A more cynical take on the policy is that apprehensions drive budgets, and if you deter people from crossing the border, you won’t apprehend as many. As one official puts it, “Agencies thrive on numbers.”

One look at the groups of travelers gathered on the Mexican side and it’s clear from their flimsy sneakers, cotton pullovers, and quart-sized water bottles that most are unprepared for the 20 to 30 miles of hellish terrain that lies ahead, where temperatures routinely soar above 100 degrees in summer and often drop below freezing in winter. Anyone who has hiked in the desert knows how deceiving it can be. Terrain that appears flat from a distance turns out to be a steeply furrowed maze of arroyos and canyons, cliffs and cul-de-sacs. Long-distance trekkers cache water and nonperishable food before heading out, as it is almost impossible to carry sufficient quantities of either. Many migrants give themselves up when they become too sick or weak to go on, or they are abandoned by coyotes, their paid guides. You see the ones who can’t continue standing meekly at highway checkpoints, waiting to be processed and deported.

There have been fences along the border with Mexico for more than a century. They just weren’t designed to keep people out. Strung with barbed wire, the first ones were erected to segregate American and Mexican cattle. The federal government didn’t start putting up pedestrian fences until 1990. The first one was built in San Diego where the number of apprehensions was approaching 500,000 per year. The fence started at the Pacific Ocean and continued several miles inland. Sixteen years later, when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, the wave of migrants trying to sneak across from Mexico was beginning to recede. But in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the specter of jihadists toting bombs across the desert and the more routine threat of Mexican drug gangs moving tons of product north provided the impetus to build what is there now. Today, a combination of pedestrian fence and vehicle barriers extends intermittently across 650 miles from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley to 1,300 feet out into the Pacific. The longest stretch is in Arizona where the illegal traffic has been heaviest in recent years.

From the beginning, the idea of walling off the border struck critics as an outdated approach to national security, a throwback to the era when we built a line of forts to protect the pioneers. It wasn’t the Berlin Wall we were re-creating but Fort Apache. As in olden days, soldiers patrol on horseback. Volunteer militiamen scour the hills for signs of invading campesinos. Along a particularly gnarly stretch of desert on Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Reservation, Indian scouts, known as Shadow Wolves, follow the trail of smugglers who wrap their shoes in fabric to cover their tracks as they guide migrants or transport drugs.

Two assessments of border security issued this year, one by the Congressional Research Service and the other by the Government Accountability Office, found that the Border Patrol has gained “effective control” of about 50 percent of the border with Mexico. Although the Border Patrol reports that it has caught 18 million illegal aliens since the mid-1990s, the number has plummeted in recent years, from 1.6 million in 2000 to 340,000 last year. At least for now, El Norte is no longer Mexico’s magnetic north. The Pew Hispanic Center reported a few months ago that the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed. The population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico living in the U.S. is almost one million fewer than it was five years ago. The report concluded: “The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.” The causes are many: an uptick in Mexican employment, a sharp decline in that country’s birth rate, the scarcity of jobs in the U.S., and a record number of deportations under President Barack Obama. There is also the fear of tangling with the murderous drug cartels that control access to the border on the Mexican side.

The border fortifications have made a difference, though it is hard to gauge how much since the trend in illegal migration had been heading downward for five years before the Secure Fence Act was passed. Fencing the border has stopped some people. A 15- to 20-foot fall from its top to a graded road or concrete apron at its base is comparable to a plunge from a diving board into an empty swimming pool. The Border Patrol and local medical personnel have reported concussions, broken limbs, and other injuries serious enough to prevent the victims from venturing any farther into the U.S.

So far, the decline in the illegal-immigrant population has not made a difference in official policy. There have been few calls for the president to tear down the fence. Just the opposite. In Arizona, a campaign is under way to raise money to build an additional 200 miles of border fence. The Texas Department of Public Safety is launching a fleet of gunboats to patrol the Rio Grande, the river that forms the state’s border with Mexico. The Obama administration is preparing to build 14 more miles of fence in South Texas.

Obama made light of Republicans’ obsession with border security with a joke about moats and alligators. But he has deported twice as many people as George W. Bush did during his first term, while deploying 1,200 National Guard and doubling the size of the Border Patrol to 22,000. As CNN’s Paul Begala said: “President Obama has put more boots on the ground on the Mexican border than any president since Woodrow Wilson was chasing Pancho Villa.”

If the border has become a safer place—as crime statistics strongly suggest—it hasn’t become safe enough in the view of many members of Congress. Lately, they have been focusing on what they see as a particularly vulnerable component of Obama’s border policy—the environment. Congressional conservatives say environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act are limiting the Border Patrol’s access to borderlands frequented by migrants and smugglers. The Government Accountability Office investigated the claim and reported back to Congress that, except in a few instances, environmental laws have not impeded law enforcement. But neither the GAO’s findings nor the denials of officials from both the Obama and Bush administrations have slowed the progress of the bill recently passed by the House. One of the most sweeping anti-environmental laws ever proposed, it would essentially nullify laws protecting parks, wilderness, and wildlife within 100 miles of the nation’s northern and southern borders. It would override century-old protections of Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, and Big Bend National Park in Texas, as well as sacred Indian sites such as Montana’s Chief Mountain and nearby Sweet Grass Hills. The bill would permit the construction of military installations, roads, airstrips, and communication towers anywhere within the 100-mile zones. Federal law-enforcement officers would be free to drive on or off roads on public or tribal land.

America’s Southwestern deserts have been sacrificed to national security for more than half a century. We exploded the first atom bomb in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto and detonated 1,000 nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site. During World War II, the Army trained nearly one million soldiers, most famously General George S. Patton’s tank battalions, on 18,000 square miles of California and Arizona desert. Today, Southwestern deserts are home to our largest missile and bombing ranges. No doubt because deserts, like the Tumacacori, are inhospitable to human life, we have treated them as if they had no life of their own.

The routes most heavily used by migrants and smugglers in recent years have been across the desert between El Paso, Texas, and the California border, a 30 million–acre wedge of land bought from Mexico in the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. The first American to survey these lands, John Russell Bartlett, described them in 1854 as an “unbroken waste, barren, wild and worthless. … One becomes sickened and disgusted with the ever-recurring sameness of plain and mountain, plant and living thing.” A bookseller from New York with no formal education beyond high school, Bartlett traveled across the desert in a private coach, which he made into a bed at night. There, he found relief from the monotony of the landscape by reading Adolph Erman’s Travels in Siberia. Heading west from El Paso, Bartlett’s party lost its way in sandstorms, fought brushfire, and warded off hostile Indians. Bartlett himself was laid low with typhoid.

If the beleaguered surveyor sometimes failed to appreciate his surroundings, he was not unlike a modern tourist speeding across the apparently lifeless region. Then as now, the desert camouflages its assets. The area that Bartlett explored, extending across southwest New Mexico, northern Mexico, and east--central Arizona, is known today as the Madrean Archipelago or more informally as the Sky Islands. A checkerboard of isolated mountains separated by vast tracts of scrub, the region teems with life. It is home to nearly twice as many types of mammals as is Yellowstone National Park. Animals that thrive here do so by virtue of extraordinary resourcefulness. Bighorn sheep find water by goring open barrel cactus and devouring its moist pulp. Kangaroo rats metabolize water from seeds and plants. The key to survival for dozens of species is unfettered access to habitat on both sides of the border. Mule deer, puma, black bears, bighorn sheep, jaguar, ocelot, Mexico’s last free-ranging bison herd, and the nearly extinct Sonoran pronghorn must be free to move back and forth to search for scarce forage and water, to escape wildfires and drought, and to find mates. Now, many of them can’t do that. The fence, along with the noise and lights of generators and radio towers, has inhibited or simply blocked their movement. The Sky Island Alliance, a conservation group, says that only three viable migration corridors are left along the eastern third of Arizona’s border with Mexico, about 120 miles. Some species have already lost 75 percent of their historic range.

The pressure on wildlife is not due entirely to border fortifications. Millions of migrants trooping across the countryside have taken a toll as well, leaving mountains of trash, starting fires, polluting springs, vandalizing historic sites, and scattering wildlife. Officials of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on Arizona’s southern border, were compelled to close two-thirds of a 330,000-acre park to the public because of the dangers posed by narcotics traffickers. In 2002, after a park ranger was shot to death by two suspected drug smugglers, Organ Pipe was declared the most dangerous park in America by the park rangers’ branch of the Fraternal Order of Police. If the militarization of the border has made parks like Organ Pipe safer for visitors—and park officials insist it has—it has not provided a respite for harried wildlife.

Border Patrol base camps carved out of wilderness, speeding jeeps, and all-terrain vehicles have cut thousands of miles of unauthorized roads through national parks and wildlife refuges, compacting soil and diverting moisture. Unchecked, the process destroys the plants that hold scarce desert water in place and provide sustenance for ranchers’ cattle and wildlife. Three years after the installation of vehicle barriers prevented smugglers from driving north through the park, officials there reported a 40 percent increase in unauthorized roads, mostly due to Border Patrol activity. A recent study of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented a vast network of new roads, forged by the Border Patrol, that had caused an alarming level of damage. “We are disturbed by both the magnitude and the extent of the impacts we recorded,” the study said. “We did not expect to find almost 8,000 miles of vehicle trails through wilderness.”

In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security pledged $50 million to repair environmental damage, but the release of that money—less than $9 million so far—has been slow. Even that allocation has outraged some conservatives. Arizona’s governor, Republican Jan Brewer, ridiculed one project to study the impact of the border fence on jaguar that range between northern Mexico and southern Arizona. In June, the House prohibited Homeland Security from spending any more money on repairing environmental damage along the border, with the sponsors of the ban referring to the payments as “extortion.”

The U.S.–Mexico border was once a co-dependent region with communities on both sides profiting from a daily exchange of goods and services, a hybrid culture with its own food, music, and commerce, where members of the same family lived on both sides, and businesses relied on an international clientele. Nogales, Arizona, for example, depended on Mexican consumers for 70 percent of its sales-tax revenue. Not only has the fence changed all that, it has cut people off from their own property. In South Texas, where the winding Rio Grande traces the border with Mexico, the fence had to be built on higher, dryer ground. Erected inside U.S. territory, it has separated some American farmers from their fields. John McClung, president of the Texas Produce Association, estimates that 35,000 to 50,000 acres planted with onions, cabbage, leafy green vegetables, and citrus are being trapped between the fence and the river.

Today, many critics of the fence are people it was supposed to protect—ranchers, farmers, and urban refugees who have been most vulnerable to the trespassing, littering, and petty thievery by migrants trooping north across their land. Arizona rancher John Ladd is one of the critics. His family has been raising cattle along the Arizona–Mexico border in the small community of Palominas for more than a century. A 15-foot-high section of fence runs along the 10-mile-long southern boundary of Ladd’s land. “They cut their way through it in a heartbeat,” says Ladd, standing next to a section of steel mesh that had been expertly peeled back. A sieve when it comes to stopping people, the fence acts as a dam. When it storms, rock and dirt pile up behind the fence, capturing the runoff that used to spread out across Ladd’s land and irrigate his pastures. When the water eventually does find a path through the fence, it gushes, cutting deep gullies and bypassing the high ground and the plants that feed Ladd’s cattle. Skinny calves bring skimpier profits. If too much water accumulates behind the fence, the area floods as it has several times along the Arizona border. The flooding killed two people and caused several million dollars in damage to hundreds of homes and businesses in Nogales and the smaller towns of Sonoyta and Lukeville in 2008. “The hydrology is tricky,” Ladd says. “You need to spend a little time out here to understand how it works. But they didn’t listen to us.”

Federal land managers warned Homeland Security officials that the design of the fence could impede normal drainage patterns during heavy rains. They didn’t heed the warnings, because they didn’t have to. The laws requiring consultation in such matters had been waived. Even though the fence was built through some of the richest wildlife habitat in the Southwest, Congress empowered Homeland Security to ignore every major environmental statute—the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and 30 other laws protecting historic structures, farmland, and American Indian relics and grave sites. As all-encompassing as it is, the waiver is a modest precursor of the legislation now making its way through Congress.

“It’s the wildlife that’s suffering the most,” says Ladd, noting the decline in the mule-deer herd that used to browse on his ranch. “We had about 200 that migrated seasonally between here and Mexico. After they finished building the wall in October, our herd has declined 70 percent from what it used to be.”

Nowhere is wildlife more abundant along the border than in the Malpai Borderlands, about 50 miles east of Ladd’s ranch. The Malpai is a tableau of grassland, marshy bottoms, and cottonwood thickets that extend from the emerald palisades of the Peloncillo Mountains to Mexico’s Sierra del Tigre. If the Sky Islands have an epicenter, the Malpai certainly qualifies. A 50-acre patch of scrub supports more rodents than does the state of Pennsylvania. In just one of the mountain passes, more species of reptiles and amphibians are found than in any other place in America. The mix of mountain and forest is ideal habitat for some of the most striking creatures in the wilds, among them the aplomado falcon, the parrot-like elegant trogon, and the jaguar, which until recently was thought to be extinct in the U.S. Slightly larger than Rhode Island, the Malpai is home to just 100 families, who have grown accustomed to surprise visits by both hungry humans and animals.

Warner Glenn is perhaps the best-known resident. His craggy features have graced the pages of menswear catalogues for many years. The kitchen wall of his modest ranch house is pocked with bullet holes where he and his wife, Wendy, dispatched a pair of rattlesnakes that had crawled behind the refrigerator. A hunting guide as well as a rancher, Glenn photographed a jaguar in 1996, laying aside his rifle and allowing the animal to escape. Glenn was violating a century-old Western code when he chose to let the animal live, but his decision became a model of Malpai conservation.
Working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Glenn and his neighbors have restored springs and vegetation, reintroduced bighorn sheep, and preserved the habitat of two dozen threatened species. One family alone spent two years rescuing a dwindling population of endangered Chiricahua leopard frogs by replenishing water holes and building an artificial stream. Their work earned the Malpai ranchers a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and gave credence to their opposition to the sort of border fence that has wrought havoc on John Ladd’s ranch. Although vehicle barriers have been built along the Malpai’s border with Mexico, they do not block wildlife migration. Now the ranchers worry that the legislation being pushed by congressional Republicans could jeopardize much of their conservation work.

More than 40 percent of our Southwestern borderlands are administered by federal agencies responsible for enforcing many of the nation’s environmental laws. Congressional critics say that these laws have made the federal lands a sanctuary for migrants and drug dealers who have crossed the border. In at least one instance, the critics say, a fleeing murderer was able to escape to Mexico through a wildlife refuge because the Border Patrol was locked out. Environmental laws have “jeopardized the safety and security of all Americans,” says Rob Bishop, the Utah congressman who sponsored the bill that would exempt the Border Patrol from the laws along the northern and southern borders.

In a rare alliance, ranchers and environmentalists along the northern and southern borders have joined to condemn Bishop’s bill. John Ladd has been one of the most outspoken. “It’ll take them a month to wreck country we’ve spent 40 years trying to build up,” he said. “How are they going to watch over a 100-mile swath of border when they can’t guard it now? I’ve had people busting through the fence every day since Thanksgiving, 15 carloads since February. This waiver is just an excuse to tear up more countryside.”

More than one agenda is being served by the bill. At least 10 of the 17 organizations listed as supporting it are advocates of more motorized travel in parks and wilderness. Bishop is one of the most stalwartly anti-environmental legislators on Capitol Hill. The group Republicans for Environmental Protection—now known as ConservAmerica—gave his environmental voting record a minus rating on two of its past three congressional scorecards. “His voting record is usually one of the worst,” said David Jenkins, the organization’s vice president for government and public affairs. “He’s philosophically against public land protection.” Lynn Scarlett, deputy secretary of the interior under George W. Bush, says she believes that Bishop’s push for a border waiver has less to do with national security than with his desire to weaken environmental protection of public land. “The facts do not bear out their argument that federal land management has obstructed law enforcement,” she says. “But by cloaking their agenda as a national-security issue, the people for it may gain enough traction.”

Curiously, a bill sold as an anti-crime measure is being pushed at a time when crime rates in border communities have been lower than those of larger, more distant cities. El Paso has remained one of the safest cities of its size in the U.S., despite the horrific violence in neighboring Juarez. Moreover, the emphasis on policing remote sections of mountains and deserts along the border may be misplaced. A national threat assessment by the Justice Department recently pointed out that almost all of the cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin entering the U.S. comes in vehicles and railcars through urban ports of entry. “Most experts do not consider the Southwest border between [ports of entry] to be the most important point of vulnerability to [weapons of mass destruction] or other types of drugs and contraband,” the Congressional Research Service told Congress earlier this year.

That is not to say the borderlands are crime-free. From the days of Geronimo, renegades and outlaws have found a refuge in the Malpai. It gave cover to Apache holdouts long after the tribe had formally surrendered in 1886. William “Curly Bill” Brocius and Ike Clanton of OK Corral fame were among dozens of outlaws who found sanctuary in these mountains. Migrants and drug smugglers have been slipping through the canyons and passes for decades. Across the entire length of the border, ranchers frequently report thefts and break-ins. The desert is still the preferred pathway north for most foreign-produced marijuana, according to the Justice Department. Border Patrol agents and other government employees have been attacked. Two agents were fatally shot during the past decade. Another was run over and killed by a fleeing suspect. The circumstances of their deaths and other border crimes have made headlines around the country, none more prominently than the fatal shooting of Robert Krentz, a Cochise County, Arizona, rancher and member of the Malpai group.

Phil Krentz says that when his brother was shot, he had gone to help a migrant he thought was in trouble. The murder remains unsolved, though authorities suspect the killer was a drug smuggler who fled into Mexico. Krentz’s death galvanized congressional supporters of Bishop’s bill to expand the Border Patrol’s authority. In a letter urging passage of the 100-mile waiver, Bishop implied that Krentz’s murderer might not have gotten away if the Border Patrol had access to the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge through which the suspect escaped to Mexico. “His murderer chose to exploit vulnerabilities on federal land to traverse in and out of the United States,” wrote Bishop in a letter to House colleagues. “It is no coincidence that at this same location, the Border Patrol access has been limited by land managers who have literally locked out Border Patrol vehicles.” Bishop was wrong, according to the Government Accountability Office, which found that the Border Patrol had its own set of locks and keys to the San Bernardino Refuge. Moreover, Krentz’s neighbor, Wendy Glenn, says that her husband accompanied a federal law--enforcement agent through the refuge in pursuit of Krentz’s killer. “They had access,” she says. “The Border Patrol was in there. Warner was there with them, following the tracks from the kill site to the border. When Bishop came down here, I told him access wasn’t a problem.”

Bill McDonald, who owns another ranch nearby, says that authorities had no chance of catching the killer with or without access to the refuge. “The killer was back in Mexico before Rob Krentz’s body was found.”

Bishop’s proposed waiver of environmental laws is an ironic tribute to Krentz. He believed in conservation and, along with McDonald, was a member of the Malpai Borderlands Group. Like the Glenns, McDonald thinks waiving environmental laws would be damaging to lands that taxpayers have spent millions of dollars trying to protect. “I have to abide by the environmental laws. Why shouldn’t the Border Patrol have to?”

McDonald describes himself as a conservative Republican, an opponent of gun control and government meddling. But like many of his neighbors, he goes his own way when it comes to the border, where day-to-day experience more than ideology tends to shape people’s views. These ranchers aid needy travelers, regardless of their immigration status, help hunt down criminals, and show fresh Border Patrol recruits how to go easy on the land.

“What I’m saying will sound like heresy,” McDonald says. “We appreciate what the Border Patrol is trying to do, but militarization alone won’t work. I’m not downplaying the dangers. We’re pretty cautious around strangers. We’re all armed. But it’s not right when people from another country can’t visit their relatives. If you want to make this country safer, you need to move people out of the shadows.”

***

Seen from a distance, the border fence is a tantalizing mirage, a piece of land art in the tradition of the Spiral Jetty or The Lightning Field, its concrete supports and steel-mesh panels rendered immaterial like a long, hard road that seems to liquefy in the harsh light. Up close, it’s more imposing, the apotheosis of a junkyard fence. In the history of cross-border insults, it ranks with Pancho Villa’s 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the U.S. government’s Harmon Doctrine denying Mexico’s right to water from the Rio Grande or Colorado River. Only, in this case, injuries have been inflicted on the culture, commerce, and environment on both sides of the border. Design flaws in the fence have caused floods that cost lives and resulted in several million dollars of damage to homes and businesses in Arizona and Mexico. Mountains in one California wilderness were dynamited to make way for the fence. In Texas, private property has been seized, elsewhere ranches trashed, and everywhere wildlife habitat damaged and ancient migration routes blocked.
Border fortifications are likely to remain in place and even grow if many in Washington have their way. Under legislation that has passed the House, the authority of the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Border Patrol would be vastly expanded. The effects on people’s livelihoods, on topography, and on natural resources would be felt across an area larger than New England. The push for even more security is due in part to people’s misperception of what the fence is supposed to accomplish. Its apparent fragility is not a mirage, as evidenced by the ladders, the 149 tunnels, and the holes in the mesh panels that make long stretches of the fence look like a patchwork quilt. In 2010 alone, more than 4,000 holes were cut. Yet it was never meant to be an impenetrable barrier. Don’t mistake the fence for something it isn’t, then–Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told Fox News five years ago: “I think the fence has come to assume a certain kind of symbolic significance, which should not obscure the fact [that sealing off the borders] is a much more complicated problem.”
All of the bluster during the Republican primary about building a double fence (Michele Bachmann), electrifying it (Herman Cain), or extending it the entire length of the 1,950-mile border (Mitt Romney) missed the point. The fence is simply one component in the militarization of the border, a $90 billion project that marshaled thousands of Border Patrol agents and National Guard, deployed manned aircraft and aerial drones, established military-style bases and a network of radio-transmission towers, and carved thousands of miles of new roads in national parks and wildlife refuges. In the end, it is a system quite different from what was originally envisioned. It is designed less to stop people from crossing the border illegally than to apprehend them once they have crossed; it slows them down and makes them easier to catch once they are in the United States.
The strategy is comparable to football’s prevent defense, in which the team playing defense doesn’t attempt to stop its opponents from crossing the 50-yard line but concentrates its efforts on preventing a touchdown. “A speed bump in the desert” is the way one Border Patrol official describes the fence. The Government Accountability Office reported in May that the strategy assumes that nearly 90 percent of apprehensions are going to be made after people have entered the country illegally. The Border Patrol put it this way: “Illegal traffic will be deterred or forced over more hostile terrain less suited for crossing and more suited for enforcement.” The fence funnels people into some of the roughest country along the border, into places like the Tumacacori wilderness, Josseline’s final resting place. A more cynical take on the policy is that apprehensions drive budgets, and if you deter people from crossing the border, you won’t apprehend as many. As one official puts it, “Agencies thrive on numbers.”
One look at the groups of travelers gathered on the Mexican side and it’s clear from their flimsy sneakers, cotton pullovers, and quart-sized water bottles that most are unprepared for the 20 to 30 miles of hellish terrain that lies ahead, where temperatures routinely soar above 100 degrees in summer and often drop below freezing in winter. Anyone who has hiked in the desert knows how deceiving it can be. Terrain that appears flat from a distance turns out to be a steeply furrowed maze of arroyos and canyons, cliffs and cul-de-sacs. Long-distance trekkers cache water and nonperishable food before heading out, as it is almost impossible to carry sufficient quantities of either. Many migrants give themselves up when they become too sick or weak to go on, or they are abandoned by coyotes, their paid guides. You see the ones who can’t continue standing meekly at highway checkpoints, waiting to be processed and deported.

***

There have been fences along the border with Mexico for more than a century. They just weren’t designed to keep people out. Strung with barbed wire, the first ones were erected to segregate American and Mexican cattle. The federal government didn’t start putting up pedestrian fences until 1990. The first one was built in San Diego where the number of apprehensions was approaching 500,000 per year. The fence started at the Pacific Ocean and continued several miles inland. Sixteen years later, when Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, the wave of migrants trying to sneak across from Mexico was beginning to recede. But in the years following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the specter of jihadists toting bombs across the desert and the more routine threat of Mexican drug gangs moving tons of product north provided the impetus to build what is there now. Today, a combination of pedestrian fence and vehicle barriers extends intermittently across 650 miles from Texas’s Rio Grande Valley to 1,300 feet out into the Pacific. The longest stretch is in Arizona where the illegal traffic has been heaviest in recent years.
From the beginning, the idea of walling off the border struck critics as an outdated approach to national security, a throwback to the era when we built a line of forts to protect the pioneers. It wasn’t the Berlin Wall we were re-creating but Fort Apache. As in olden days, soldiers patrol on horseback. Volunteer militiamen scour the hills for signs of invading campesinos. Along a particularly gnarly stretch of desert on Arizona’s Tohono O’odham Reservation, Indian scouts, known as Shadow Wolves, follow the trail of smugglers who wrap their shoes in fabric to cover their tracks as they guide migrants or transport drugs.
Two assessments of border security issued this year, one by the Congressional Research Service and the other by the Government Accountability Office, found that the Border Patrol has gained “effective control” of about 50 percent of the border with Mexico. Although the Border Patrol reports that it has caught 18 million illegal aliens since the mid-1990s, the number has plummeted in recent years, from 1.6 million in 2000 to 340,000 last year. At least for now, El Norte is no longer Mexico’s magnetic north. The Pew Hispanic Center reported a few months ago that the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed. The population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico living in the U.S. is almost one million fewer than it was five years ago. The report concluded: “The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill.” The causes are many: an uptick in Mexican employment, a sharp decline in that country’s birth rate, the scarcity of jobs in the U.S., and a record number of deportations under President Barack Obama. There is also the fear of tangling with the murderous drug cartels that control access to the border on the Mexican side.
The border fortifications have made a difference, though it is hard to gauge how much since the trend in illegal migration had been heading downward for five years before the Secure Fence Act was passed. Fencing the border has stopped some people. A 15- to 20-foot fall from its top to a graded road or concrete apron at its base is comparable to a plunge from a diving board into an empty swimming pool. The Border Patrol and local medical personnel have reported concussions, broken limbs, and other injuries serious enough to prevent the victims from venturing any farther into the U.S.
So far, the decline in the illegal-immigrant population has not made a difference in official policy. There have been few calls for the president to tear down the fence. Just the opposite. In Arizona, a campaign is under way to raise money to build an additional 200 miles of border fence. The Texas Department of Public Safety is launching a fleet of gunboats to patrol the Rio Grande, the river that forms the state’s border with Mexico. The Obama administration is preparing to build 14 more miles of fence in South Texas.
Obama made light of Republicans’ obsession with border security with a joke about moats and alligators. But he has deported twice as many people as George W. Bush did during his first term, while deploying 1,200 National Guard and doubling the size of the Border Patrol to 22,000. As CNN’s Paul Begala said: “President Obama has put more boots on the ground on the Mexican border than any president since Woodrow Wilson was chasing Pancho Villa.”
If the border has become a safer place—as crime statistics strongly suggest—it hasn’t become safe enough in the view of many members of Congress. Lately, they have been focusing on what they see as a particularly vulnerable component of Obama’s border policy—the environment. Congressional conservatives say environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act are limiting the Border Patrol’s access to borderlands frequented by migrants and smugglers. The Government Accountability Office investigated the claim and reported back to Congress that, except in a few instances, environmental laws have not impeded law enforcement. But neither the GAO’s findings nor the denials of officials from both the Obama and Bush administrations have slowed the progress of the bill recently passed by the House. One of the most sweeping anti-environmental laws ever proposed, it would essentially nullify laws protecting parks, wilderness, and wildlife within 100 miles of the nation’s northern and southern borders. It would override century-old protections of Olympic National Park in Washington, Glacier National Park in Montana, Voyageurs National Park and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, and Big Bend National Park in Texas, as well as sacred Indian sites such as Montana’s Chief Mountain and nearby Sweet Grass Hills. The bill would permit the construction of military installations, roads, airstrips, and communication towers anywhere within the 100-mile zones. Federal law-enforcement officers would be free to drive on or off roads on public or tribal land.

***

America’s Southwestern deserts have been sacrificed to national security for more than half a century. We exploded the first atom bomb in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto and detonated 1,000 nuclear devices at the Nevada Test Site. During World War II, the Army trained nearly one million soldiers, most famously General George S. Patton’s tank battalions, on 18,000 square miles of California and Arizona desert. Today, Southwestern deserts are home to our largest missile and bombing ranges. No doubt because deserts, like the Tumacacori, are inhospitable to human life, we have treated them as if they had no life of their own.
The routes most heavily used by migrants and smugglers in recent years have been across the desert between El Paso, Texas, and the California border, a 30 million–acre wedge of land bought from Mexico in the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. The first American to survey these lands, John Russell Bartlett, described them in 1854 as an “unbroken waste, barren, wild and worthless. … One becomes sickened and disgusted with the ever-recurring sameness of plain and mountain, plant and living thing.” A bookseller from New York with no formal education beyond high school, Bartlett traveled across the desert in a private coach, which he made into a bed at night. There, he found relief from the monotony of the landscape by reading Adolph Erman’s Travels in Siberia. Heading west from El Paso, Bartlett’s party lost its way in sandstorms, fought brushfire, and warded off hostile Indians. Bartlett himself was laid low with typhoid.
If the beleaguered surveyor sometimes failed to appreciate his surroundings, he was not unlike a modern tourist speeding across the apparently lifeless region. Then as now, the desert camouflages its assets. The area that Bartlett explored, extending across southwest New Mexico, northern Mexico, and east--central Arizona, is known today as the Madrean Archipelago or more informally as the Sky Islands. A checkerboard of isolated mountains separated by vast tracts of scrub, the region teems with life. It is home to nearly twice as many types of mammals as is Yellowstone National Park. Animals that thrive here do so by virtue of extraordinary resourcefulness. Bighorn sheep find water by goring open barrel cactus and devouring its moist pulp. Kangaroo rats metabolize water from seeds and plants. The key to survival for dozens of species is unfettered access to habitat on both sides of the border. Mule deer, puma, black bears, bighorn sheep, jaguar, ocelot, Mexico’s last free-ranging bison herd, and the nearly extinct Sonoran pronghorn must be free to move back and forth to search for scarce forage and water, to escape wildfires and drought, and to find mates. Now, many of them can’t do that. The fence, along with the noise and lights of generators and radio towers, has inhibited or simply blocked their movement. The Sky Island Alliance, a conservation group, says that only three viable migration corridors are left along the eastern third of Arizona’s border with Mexico, about 120 miles. Some species have already lost 75 percent of their historic range.
The pressure on wildlife is not due entirely to border fortifications. Millions of migrants trooping across the countryside have taken a toll as well, leaving mountains of trash, starting fires, polluting springs, vandalizing historic sites, and scattering wildlife. Officials of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, on Arizona’s southern border, were compelled to close two-thirds of a 330,000-acre park to the public because of the dangers posed by narcotics traffickers. In 2002, after a park ranger was shot to death by two suspected drug smugglers, Organ Pipe was declared the most dangerous park in America by the park rangers’ branch of the Fraternal Order of Police. If the militarization of the border has made parks like Organ Pipe safer for visitors—and park officials insist it has—it has not provided a respite for harried wildlife.
Border Patrol base camps carved out of wilderness, speeding jeeps, and all-terrain vehicles have cut thousands of miles of unauthorized roads through national parks and wildlife refuges, compacting soil and diverting moisture. Unchecked, the process destroys the plants that hold scarce desert water in place and provide sustenance for ranchers’ cattle and wildlife. Three years after the installation of vehicle barriers prevented smugglers from driving north through the park, officials there reported a 40 percent increase in unauthorized roads, mostly due to Border Patrol activity. A recent study of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge conducted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service documented a vast network of new roads, forged by the Border Patrol, that had caused an alarming level of damage. “We are disturbed by both the magnitude and the extent of the impacts we recorded,” the study said. “We did not expect to find almost 8,000 miles of vehicle trails through wilderness.”
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security pledged $50 million to repair environmental damage, but the release of that money—less than $9 million so far—has been slow. Even that allocation has outraged some conservatives. Arizona’s governor, Republican Jan Brewer, ridiculed one project to study the impact of the border fence on jaguar that range between northern Mexico and southern Arizona. In June, the House prohibited Homeland Security from spending any more money on repairing environmental damage along the border, with the sponsors of the ban referring to the payments as “extortion.”
The U.S.–Mexico border was once a co-dependent region with communities on both sides profiting from a daily exchange of goods and services, a hybrid culture with its own food, music, and commerce, where members of the same family lived on both sides, and businesses relied on an international clientele. Nogales, Arizona, for example, depended on Mexican consumers for 70 percent of its sales-tax revenue. Not only has the fence changed all that, it has cut people off from their own property. In South Texas, where the winding Rio Grande traces the border with Mexico, the fence had to be built on higher, dryer ground. Erected inside U.S. territory, it has separated some American farmers from their fields. John McClung, president of the Texas Produce Association, estimates that 35,000 to 50,000 acres planted with onions, cabbage, leafy green vegetables, and citrus are being trapped between the fence and the river.
Today, many critics of the fence are people it was supposed to protect—ranchers, farmers, and urban refugees who have been most vulnerable to the trespassing, littering, and petty thievery by migrants trooping north across their land. Arizona rancher John Ladd is one of the critics. His family has been raising cattle along the Arizona–Mexico border in the small community of Palominas for more than a century. A 15-foot-high section of fence runs along the 10-mile-long southern boundary of Ladd’s land. “They cut their way through it in a heartbeat,” says Ladd, standing next to a section of steel mesh that had been expertly peeled back. A sieve when it comes to stopping people, the fence acts as a dam. When it storms, rock and dirt pile up behind the fence, capturing the runoff that used to spread out across Ladd’s land and irrigate his pastures. When the water eventually does find a path through the fence, it gushes, cutting deep gullies and bypassing the high ground and the plants that feed Ladd’s cattle. Skinny calves bring skimpier profits. If too much water accumulates behind the fence, the area floods as it has several times along the Arizona border. The flooding killed two people and caused several million dollars in damage to hundreds of homes and businesses in Nogales and the smaller towns of Sonoyta and Lukeville in 2008. “The hydrology is tricky,” Ladd says. “You need to spend a little time out here to understand how it works. But they didn’t listen to us.”
Federal land managers warned Homeland Security officials that the design of the fence could impede normal drainage patterns during heavy rains. They didn’t heed the warnings, because they didn’t have to. The laws requiring consultation in such matters had been waived. Even though the fence was built through some of the richest wildlife habitat in the Southwest, Congress empowered Homeland Security to ignore every major environmental statute—the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and 30 other laws protecting historic structures, farmland, and American Indian relics and grave sites. As all-encompassing as it is, the waiver is a modest precursor of the legislation now making its way through Congress.
“It’s the wildlife that’s suffering the most,” says Ladd, noting the decline in the mule-deer herd that used to browse on his ranch. “We had about 200 that migrated seasonally between here and Mexico. After they finished building the wall in October, our herd has declined 70 percent from what it used to be.”

***

Nowhere is wildlife more abundant along the border than in the Malpai Borderlands, about 50 miles east of Ladd’s ranch. The Malpai is a tableau of grassland, marshy bottoms, and cottonwood thickets that extend from the emerald palisades of the Peloncillo Mountains to Mexico’s Sierra del Tigre. If the Sky Islands have an epicenter, the Malpai certainly qualifies. A 50-acre patch of scrub supports more rodents than does the state of Pennsylvania. In just one of the mountain passes, more species of reptiles and amphibians are found than in any other place in America. The mix of mountain and forest is ideal habitat for some of the most striking creatures in the wilds, among them the aplomado falcon, the parrot-like elegant trogon, and the jaguar, which until recently was thought to be extinct in the U.S. Slightly larger than Rhode Island, the Malpai is home to just 100 families, who have grown accustomed to surprise visits by both hungry humans and animals.
Warner Glenn is perhaps the best-known resident. His craggy features have graced the pages of menswear catalogues for many years. The kitchen wall of his modest ranch house is pocked with bullet holes where he and his wife, Wendy, dispatched a pair of rattlesnakes that had crawled behind the refrigerator. A hunting guide as well as a rancher, Glenn photographed a jaguar in 1996, laying aside his rifle and allowing the animal to escape. Glenn was violating a century-old Western code when he chose to let the animal live, but his decision became a model of Malpai conservation. Working with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Glenn and his neighbors have restored springs and vegetation, reintroduced bighorn sheep, and preserved the habitat of two dozen threatened species. One family alone spent two years rescuing a dwindling population of endangered Chiricahua leopard frogs by replenishing water holes and building an artificial stream. Their work earned the Malpai ranchers a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and gave credence to their opposition to the sort of border fence that has wrought havoc on John Ladd’s ranch. Although vehicle barriers have been built along the Malpai’s border with Mexico, they do not block wildlife migration. Now the ranchers worry that the legislation being pushed by congressional Republicans could jeopardize much of their conservation work.
More than 40 percent of our Southwestern borderlands are administered by federal agencies responsible for enforcing many of the nation’s environmental laws. Congressional critics say that these laws have made the federal lands a sanctuary for migrants and drug dealers who have crossed the border. In at least one instance, the critics say, a fleeing murderer was able to escape to Mexico through a wildlife refuge because the Border Patrol was locked out. Environmental laws have “jeopardized the safety and security of all Americans,” says Rob Bishop, the Utah congressman who sponsored the bill that would exempt the Border Patrol from the laws along the northern and southern borders.
In a rare alliance, ranchers and environmentalists along the northern and southern borders have joined to condemn Bishop’s bill. John Ladd has been one of the most outspoken. “It’ll take them a month to wreck country we’ve spent 40 years trying to build up,” he said. “How are they going to watch over a 100-mile swath of border when they can’t guard it now? I’ve had people busting through the fence every day since Thanksgiving, 15 carloads since February. This waiver is just an excuse to tear up more countryside.”
More than one agenda is being served by the bill. At least 10 of the 17 organizations listed as supporting it are advocates of more motorized travel in parks and wilderness. Bishop is one of the most stalwartly anti-environmental legislators on Capitol Hill. The group Republicans for Environmental Protection—now known as ConservAmerica—gave his environmental voting record a minus rating on two of its past three congressional scorecards. “His voting record is usually one of the worst,” said David Jenkins, the organization’s vice president for government and public affairs. “He’s philosophically against public land protection.” Lynn Scarlett, deputy secretary of the interior under George W. Bush, says she believes that Bishop’s push for a border waiver has less to do with national security than with his desire to weaken environmental protection of public land. “The facts do not bear out their argument that federal land management has obstructed law enforcement,” she says. “But by cloaking their agenda as a national-security issue, the people for it may gain enough traction.”
Curiously, a bill sold as an anti-crime measure is being pushed at a time when crime rates in border communities have been lower than those of larger, more distant cities. El Paso has remained one of the safest cities of its size in the U.S., despite the horrific violence in neighboring Juarez. Moreover, the emphasis on policing remote sections of mountains and deserts along the border may be misplaced. A national threat assessment by the Justice Department recently pointed out that almost all of the cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin entering the U.S. comes in vehicles and railcars through urban ports of entry. “Most experts do not consider the Southwest border between [ports of entry] to be the most important point of vulnerability to [weapons of mass destruction] or other types of drugs and contraband,” the Congressional Research Service told Congress earlier this year.
That is not to say the borderlands are crime-free. From the days of Geronimo, renegades and outlaws have found a refuge in the Malpai. It gave cover to Apache holdouts long after the tribe had formally surrendered in 1886. William “Curly Bill” Brocius and Ike Clanton of OK Corral fame were among dozens of outlaws who found sanctuary in these mountains. Migrants and drug smugglers have been slipping through the canyons and passes for decades. Across the entire length of the border, ranchers frequently report thefts and break-ins. The desert is still the preferred pathway north for most foreign-produced marijuana, according to the Justice Department. Border Patrol agents and other government employees have been attacked. Two agents were fatally shot during the past decade. Another was run over and killed by a fleeing suspect. The circumstances of their deaths and other border crimes have made headlines around the country, none more prominently than the fatal shooting of Robert Krentz, a Cochise County, Arizona, rancher and member of the Malpai group.
Phil Krentz says that when his brother was shot, he had gone to help a migrant he thought was in trouble. The murder remains unsolved, though authorities suspect the killer was a drug smuggler who fled into Mexico. Krentz’s death galvanized congressional supporters of Bishop’s bill to expand the Border Patrol’s authority. In a letter urging passage of the 100-mile waiver, Bishop implied that Krentz’s murderer might not have gotten away if the Border Patrol had access to the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge through which the suspect escaped to Mexico. “His murderer chose to exploit vulnerabilities on federal land to traverse in and out of the United States,” wrote Bishop in a letter to House colleagues. “It is no coincidence that at this same location, the Border Patrol access has been limited by land managers who have literally locked out Border Patrol vehicles.” Bishop was wrong, according to the Government Accountability Office, which found that the Border Patrol had its own set of locks and keys to the San Bernardino Refuge. Moreover, Krentz’s neighbor, Wendy Glenn, says that her husband accompanied a federal law--enforcement agent through the refuge in pursuit of Krentz’s killer. “They had access,” she says. “The Border Patrol was in there. Warner was there with them, following the tracks from the kill site to the border. When Bishop came down here, I told him access wasn’t a problem.”
Bill McDonald, who owns another ranch nearby, says that authorities had no chance of catching the killer with or without access to the refuge. “The killer was back in Mexico before Rob Krentz’s body was found.”
Bishop’s proposed waiver of environmental laws is an ironic tribute to Krentz. He believed in conservation and, along with McDonald, was a member of the Malpai Borderlands Group. Like the Glenns, McDonald thinks waiving environmental laws would be damaging to lands that taxpayers have spent millions of dollars trying to protect. “I have to abide by the environmental laws. Why shouldn’t the Border Patrol have to?”
McDonald describes himself as a conservative Republican, an opponent of gun control and government meddling. But like many of his neighbors, he goes his own way when it comes to the border, where day-to-day experience more than ideology tends to shape people’s views. These ranchers aid needy travelers, regardless of their immigration status, help hunt down criminals, and show fresh Border Patrol recruits how to go easy on the land.
“What I’m saying will sound like heresy,” McDonald says. “We appreciate what the Border Patrol is trying to do, but militarization alone won’t work. I’m not downplaying the dangers. We’re pretty cautious around strangers. We’re all armed. But it’s not right when people from another country can’t visit their relatives. If you want to make this country safer, you need to move people out of the shadows.”

http://prospect.org/article/border-effect