Rush to build border fence endangers sites
Park Service says up to 22 archaeological places face damage
Bulldozers and excavators rushing to install President Donald Trump’s border barrier could damage or destroy up to 22 archaeological sites within Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in coming months, according to an internal National Park Service report obtained by the Washington Post.
The administration’s plan to convert an existing five-foot-high vehicle barrier into a 30-foot steel edifice could pose irreparable harm to unexcavated remnants of ancient Sonoran Desert peoples. Experts identified these risks as U.S. Customs and Border Protection seeks to fast-track the pace of construction to meet Trump’s campaign pledge of completing 500 miles of barrier by next year’s election.
Unlike concerns about the barrier project that have come from private landowners, churches, communities and advocacy groups, these new warnings about potential destruction of historic sites come from within the government itself.
Pressure, external challenges
The National Park Service’s 123page report, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, emerges from a well-respected federal agency within the Department of the Interior while the Department of Homeland Security and the White House push ahead with their construction plans. While the government scrambles to analyze vulnerable sites as heavy equipment moves in, the administration also faces external challenges seeking to block the use of eminent domain to seize land and lawsuits asking courts to cease work in and around wildlife refuges and other protected lands.
New construction began last month within the Organ Pipe Cactus monument, an internationally recognized biosphere reserve southwest of Phoenix with nearly 330,000 acres of congressionally designated wilderness. The work is part of a 43-mile span of fencing that also traverses the adjacent Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge.
With the president demanding weekly updates on construction progress and tweeting out drone footage of new fencing through the desert, administration officials have said they are under extraordinary pressure to meet Trump’s construction goals.
The Department of Homeland Security has taken advantage of a 2005 law to waive several federal requirements that could have slowed and possibly stopped the barrier’s advance in the stretch in Arizona, including the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the National Historic Preservation Act and the Endangered Species Act.
The Organ Pipe Cactus area has been one of the busiest along the border for migrant crossings this year, an influx that includes large groups of adults with children walking through the desert to surrender to U.S. agents, typically seeking humanitarian protections.
Some archaeological features along the border already have suffered damage as Border Patrol agents zoom through the desert in pursuit of migrants and smugglers in all-terrain vehicles, according to federal officials and two experts who have conducted research in the region.
CBP officials said the agency has looked at “most” of the archaeological sites identified in the Park Service report and found just five that are within the 60-footwide strip of land on the U.S. side of the border where the government will erect the structure, an area of federal land known as the Roosevelt Reservation, which was set aside along the border in California, Arizona and New Mexico. Of those five, officials said, one had a “lithic scatter” — remnants of stone tools and other culturally relevant artifacts.
Officials said crews with earthmoving equipment have started installing barriers in a two-mile section east of the border crossing at Lukeville, Ariz., a particularly busy stretch for illegal crossings.
CBP officials acknowledged that trucks and earth-moving equipment driving through the fragile desert risk harming sites outside the specific border construction zone. The officials said they are following Park Service guidance as to where they can drive.
With CBP, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their construction contractors under pressure from the White House, federal land in the West has become the easiest place to quickly add fencing. There are few private landowners in the desert terrain outside Texas, and it is a far easier place to build than along the winding riverbanks of the Rio Grande.
At least a dozen Native American tribes claim a connection to the lands within Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, especially near Quitobaquito. They include the Tohono O’odham Nation, which used to inhabit a large swath of the Sonoran Desert and whose reservation lies north of the park’s boundaries. Members of the nation - who have revived the practice of following the Old Salt Trail — have protested the idea of any new construction in an area once inhabited by their ancestors, the Hohokam, who lived in the area between 200 and 1,400 A.D.
Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris Jr. said his tribe remains opposed to any new border fence construction.
“We’ve historically lived in this area from time immemorial,” he said. “We feel very strongly that this particular wall will desecrate this area forever. I would compare it to building a wall over your parents’ graveyards. It would have the same effect.”
In the Park Service report summarizing the results of a survey of 11.3 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, the agency’s archaeologists note that previous research had “identified and recorded 17 archaeological sites which likely will be wholly or partially destroyed by forthcoming border fence construction.” The park experts, who conducted their survey in June, identified five more archaeological sites that also would be imperiled and would deserve to be protected under a National Register of Historic Places designation.
The report notes that staffers were unable to complete a survey of the entire length of the U.S. side of the border that lies within the monument’s boundaries. Park Service archaeologists plan to survey another 1.7-mile section of the park’s southern border later this month.
Putting wall there ‘insane’
Kevin Dahl, Arizona senior program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that under normal circumstances, the agency would take steps to protect archaeological sites under its purview, including a lengthy excavation process if necessary.
CBP has announced plans to complete this section of barriers through the national monument by January. Those plans call for new fencing in five or six “noncontiguous areas,” including places within the monument where the archelological sites are found, agency officials said. The sections of new barrier are not necessarily contiguous because the terrain might be too steep or mountainous to install a single, unbroken span of fencing.
The project within the monument includes a new steel bollard fence running continuously for 9.1 miles, reinforced with an 8- to 10foot-deep concrete-and-steel foundation.
“Archaeology takes time, and they have a deadline,” Dahl said, referring to CBP. “Putting a wall there is insane. This is just one more reason why ramming this wall through, using illegal, unconstitutional money, is damaging to these public resources. We’re destroying what the wall is supposed to protect.”