Trump’s wall is in pieces that could linger for decades
The SIERRA VISTA, ARIZ. — sweeping view of undefiled wilderness on the border with Mexico long rewarded hikers who completed the Arizona Trail, an 800-mile route winding through deserts, canyons and forests.
Then something else came into focus a few weeks ago at the forbidding site in the Huachuca Mountains: a lonely segment of border wall, connected to nothing at all, in an area where migrants rarely even try to cross into the United States.
“There it was, this unfinished piece of completely pointless wall, right in this magical place,” said Julia Sheehan, 31, a nurse and former Air Force mechanic who trekked to the site with three other military veterans who are hiking the Arizona Trail. “It’s one of the most senseless things I’ve ever seen.”
The quarter-mile fragment of wall is part of an array of new barrier segments along the border, some of them bizarre in appearance and of no apparent utility, that contractors rushed to build in the waning days of the Trump administration — well after President Joe Biden made it clear that he would halt border wall construction.
Now the incomplete border wall, already one of the costliest megaprojects in U.S. history, with an estimated eventual price tag of more than $15 billion, is igniting tensions again as critics urge Biden to tear down parts of the wall and Republican leaders call on him to finish it.
The latest controversy over the wall comes amid a significant increase in migration across the border that is prompting U.S. authorities to search for extra places to hold new arrivals, especially unaccompanied children and teenagers.
More than 9,400 young migrants arrived along the border without parents in February, a nearly threefold increase over last year at the same time, creating a serious humanitarian challenge.
The Biden administration suspended construction on the border wall on Jan. 20, the president’s first day in office, announcing a 60-day period during which officials are determining how to proceed.
Former President Donald Trump made the wall a symbol of his administration’s efforts to slash immigration. While many stretches of the 1,954-mile border already had some low-level barriers built by previous administrations, the project was mired in controversy from the start.
Only a few miles were built in South Texas, the area most prone to illegal crossings. Instead, much of the construction, especially in the Trump administration’s closing days, has taken place in remote parts of Arizona where crossings in recent years have been relatively uncommon.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency responsible for selecting border wall construction sites, contended in a statement last week that locations chosen for new border barriers are “areas of high illegal entry.”
“Border barriers slow and stop illegal activity,” said Matthew Dyman, a CBP spokesman.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s homeland security secretary, has been directed to decide whether to “resume, modify, or terminate” projects when the 60-day suspension ends this month. But the last-minute construction efforts, with much of the rushed building activity taking place in the days between the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump loyalists and Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, have left a curious tableau for the new administration to evaluate.
Some stretches of the border, especially on federal lands that are relatively flat, now have long, continuous segments of 30-foot high steel barriers that could endure in the desert for decades to come.
But in other areas, border-crossers can easily tiptoe around far-flung islands of wall, some of which look more like conceptual art pieces than imposing barriers to entry.
There are half-dynamited mountaintops where work crews put down their tools in January, leaving a heightened risk of rapid erosion and even dangerous landslides as the summer monsoon season approaches.
In some areas, colossal piles of unused steel bollards linger at deserted work sites, next to idled bulldozers and water-hauling trucks. In Arizona, ranchers are complaining that rough roads carved by work crews into hillsides near uncompleted segments of wall now serve as easy access points for smugglers and others seeking to enter the once-remote areas along the border.
“Now there are so many access roads that it’s possible for someone to walk right up to places where the wall ends, and have someone just pick them up,” said Valer Clark, a conservationist who has bought and sought to preserve about 150,000 acres of land along the border in both the United States and Mexico.
Clark said a ranch manager recently quit after a break-in at his family’s home, the kind of crime that was rare in the area before the new roads appeared.
Altogether, the Trump administration completed about 453 miles of border wall since 2017.
Almost $4 billion for the border wall was diverted from funding originally appropriated to the Defense Department.
Most of the construction involved upgrading smaller existing barriers. In places where no barriers previously existed, such as the rugged terrain where the Arizona Trail winds to its terminus, the Trump administration built a total of 47 miles of new primary wall.
The Biden administration has not made clear precisely what plans it has for the wall. But in February, after temporarily suspending building activities, Biden rescinded the national emergency that his predecessor used to justify advancing construction.
The most severe and debilitating cases of agoraphobia — when people can’t leave their homes — are about 80 to 90% women.
Most of us have experi- enced a healthy dose of anxiety over the past year about leaving home and risking exposure to the deadly coronavirus. But for some of us, the anxiety is developing into a potentially long-lasting and debilitating disorder.
The disorder is known as agoraphobia and, in cases brought on by the pandemic, involves an inability to distin- guish between the rational fear of the virus and an irrational fear of venturing out. And psychologists expect to see more cases in the coming months, with women and young adults most susceptible.
“It would be highly under- standable if the symptomatology went up as we open our doors and get more com- fortable, moving outside and getting more into the square, into the agora,” said Charles Waehler, professor of counseling psychology at the University of Akron.
Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reached out to Waehler, and Dr. Scott Bea, clinical psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic, to answer questions posed by our read- ers. As more people are vaccinated and the pandemic subsides, will agoraphobia be more common? How can you distinguish rational fear of the virus and irrational anx- ieties? What should you do if you’re experiencing symp- toms of agoraphobia?
Here is what we learned:
First, a brief primer on agoraphobia.
The disorder typically involves the anticipation of being away from home or in a particular situation, a crowded place or stuck in traf- fic, that results in a disabling fear of becoming trapped or embarrassed.
To be diagnosed with agoraphobia — a term coined for a fear of the agora, or the Greek marketplace — a patient has to have consistent symptoms for at least six months, Waehler said. Those symptoms can include panic attacks, intense fear or anxiety around situations includ- ing using public transportation, being in open spaces, being in enclosed spaces, standing in lines or crowds and being outside your home alone, according to the Diag- nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
There’s a strong genetic component to agoraphobia, so people are more likely to be diagnosed if they have a relative with the disorder, Waehler said. It’s also more common among women. The most severe and debili- tating cases of agoraphobia — when people can’t leave their homes — are about 80 to 90% women.
Most agoraphobia develops when people are in their 20s and 30s, which Waehler attributed to older people having a deeper pool of lived experience to draw from, which allows them to know that a certain anxiety-producing situation was safe or acceptable before, so it might be again.
Distinguishing between the rational fear of the virus and irrational anx- iety can prove difficult, and could cause feelings of agoraphobia.
Some amount of anxiety is good because it “keep us safe and it keeps us smart,” Waehler said.
“We look both ways when we cross the street because we’re afraid we’re going to get hit by a car. That’s a good thing,” he said. “I tell my students, what do we call somebody who has no anxiety? We call him dead. We need a little bit of anxiety.”
And with the pandemic, it’s good for people to have some fear of the virus if it means they wear a mask, wash their hands and practice social distancing.
“But there is a certain number of the population who are going to spin out of control, that their anxiety is going to get the best of them and they’re going to go to very negative places,” Waehler said.
Bea described the beginning of the pandemic, when we didn’t know much about the virus and grocery shopping was suddenly a major event. Most of us put on a mask and gloves, maybe a face shield too, and were constantly sanitizing before the main event of wiping down our groceries with disinfectant.
Most of us are now at ease when it comes to putting away groceries because we know more about how the virus spreads from person to person.
Waehler predicts that symptoms of agoraphobia will lessen for many people over time as they have new experiences and become more comfortable with encountering the world outside their home.