Border wall is still in pieces
Trump’s pet project continues to ignite tensions on both sides
SIERRA VISTA, Ariz. — The 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 60day 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 lastminute 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 farflung islands of wall.
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.
Altogether, the Trump administration completed about 453 miles of border wall since 2017. Almost $4 billion for the 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, the Trump administration built a total of 47 miles of new primary wall.
Rodney S. Scott, the chief of the Border Patrol, conceded in November that constructing in South Texas, rather than Arizona, was a “higher priority for the U.S. Border Patrol.” But he said “we elected to go ahead and shift down to a lower priority because I could make a difference there and then.”
The area near the Arizona Trail was not the only place where there was a flurry of building activity in the closing days of the previous administration. Between Jan. 4 and Jan. 8 alone, Customs and Border Protection began construction on 12 additional miles of border wall, according to the agency’s disclosures.
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.
Democratic members of Congress from border states, including Veronica Escobar of Texas and Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, wrote to Biden this month urging him to cancel all remaining construction contracts and divert remaining funds to removing portions of the wall in places with “particularly destructive environmental damage and destruction of sacred sites.”
At the same time, Republicans are positioning themselves around the gaps in the border wall, sometimes literally, in an effort to portray Biden as soft on immigration.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., complained after a visit in February to the border in Arizona that a gap in the wall there was allowing migrants to illegally enter the country across an unprotected wash.
“Nothing around here makes sense unless you plug this hole,” Graham said.