Chunks of unconnected border wall scar American landscape, prestige
Imagine if government contractors bulldozed access roads through the pristine desert terrain at Red Rock Canyon just to put up a useless section of security fencing that wasn’t connected at either end. This is exactly what happened in Arizona this past January.
The scenario described above occurred in the Coronado National Monument in Arizona, where contractors building the previous presidential administration’s contemptible border wall rushed to put up a quarter-mile section of the barrier in the three weeks before President Joe Biden took office. The construction will have absolutely no effect on border crossings, as the section can simply be walked around on both ends.
That is, if anybody even cares to sidestep it. The portion of the wall is in an area where there were barely any border crossings to begin with.
“There it was, this unfinished piece of completely pointless wall, right in this magical place,” a hiker and former Air Force mechanic told The New York Times. “It’s one of the most senseless things I’ve ever seen.”
Indeed.
As the Times reported, the standalone section of the wall was one of several slapped up in the final days of the previous administration. Elsewhere, contractors left behind disconnected barriers and unfinished projects at sites that look like a combination of bombing ranges and junkyards — hills dynamited, piles of unused bollards left on the ground, heavy equipment sitting idle.
Those sites now stand as monuments to a vandal president’s cruel xenophobia, archaic thinking and destructive environmental policies.
No doubt, too, they were built to spite Biden and the millions of Americans who opposed the wall project. The work started after Congress certified the election results after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, long after Biden had revealed he had no intention of finishing the wall. Biden signed an executive order halting the construction on Jan. 20, his first day in office.
But now, GOP leaders are seizing on the influx of Central American migrants at the border to bash Biden’s immigration policies and call for him to finish the wall. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., went so far as to travel to a gapped section of the wall in February in a display of political theater designed to make Biden look soft on immigration.
“Nothing around here makes sense unless you plug this hole,” Graham said.
Actually, what made no sense was Graham’s logic. Only in the twisted minds of GOP leaders does erecting barriers in lightly traveled places like the Coronado National Monument solve the type of influx we’re seeing today, in which the majority of immigrants are arriving hundreds of miles away in Texas. It’s also well worth noting that former President Donald Trump only managed to build 80 new miles of his “big, beautiful wall” at the border in four years while spending upwards of $15 billion on it — the other 370 miles of the project were replacements or upgrades of existing barriers and fences. Let’s remember, too, that the wall has been easily scaled with rope ladders and cut with inexpensive power saws.
Worse yet, border residents say the access roads built for construction crews made it easier for drug smugglers and other border crossers to get through. It was like building freeways for them.
The reality is that Biden shouldn’t build any more wall, period, but should stick to his plan to improve border security by more strategic means, such as improving detection/surveillance technology, upgrading infrastructure at points of entry and enhancing officer training. The administration also shouldn’t stray from its plan to address the root cause of migration, by providing $4 billion in funding for programs to curb violence and corruption in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which will stem refugee flow.
Meanwhile, Biden should tear down the patchwork eyesores like those in the Arizona desert, and start working to undo the enormous environmental damage caused by their construction.
Unfortunately, some of that damage won’t be reparable anytime soon. The hillsides that were blasted away are now in danger of being further marred by rapid erosion in monsoon rains, while water supplies were plundered to mix concrete and terrain was chewed up by construction vehicles. And unfortunately, the desert takes a lot of time to heal from damage like that — tank tracks from World War Ii-era training exercises in the Mojave Desert still scar the landscape there.
But the sooner the walls are gone, the sooner the healing can begin.