US security secretary visits border

TUCSON — Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf traveled to Arizona’s borderlands on Tuesday to tour border wall construction projects in sensitive lands, paid for using funds diverted from the military, and to gauge his department’s response to the new coronavirus pandemic.

Construction at the sites Wolf visited Tuesday has continued full-speed ahead, even as the COVID-19 pandemic paralyzed nearly all other activity along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security imposed a series of restrictions at the border targeting migrants and asylum seekers. The department said it aimed to avoid exposing migrants and border agents and officers to an outbreak at temporary holding facilities near the border.

“These are individuals that come to us with little to no medical history, little to no travel history, and oftentimes with no identity documents,” Wolf said. “So it’s very difficult to do any medical checks on them, understand where they’ve been and what they ... perhaps, have been exposed to. So we want to make sure that we’re not exposing our front-line workforce to that.”

During a news conference following his brief visit to southern Arizona, Wolf said the travel restrictions have resulted in a 65% to 70% drop in border traffic.

Border Patrol agents now are able to immediately expel migrants back to Mexico or their home countries. Since the restrictions began on March 21, agents have turned back at least 20,000 migrants. Wolf said Tuesday nearly 80% of those expulsions took less than two hours.

This policy resulted in a sharp drop in the number of migrants border agents have taken into custody. As part of his visit, Wolf toured the central processing facility for Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector, which spans two-thirds of the Arizona-Mexico border. He said there were only four migrants inside when he visited.

Wolf began his visit with tours of the Mariposa commercial port of entry and the Nogales Border Patrol station. He then took an aerial tour of the border wall construction happening in southern Arizona.

DHS declined to identify which sites he visited. Video released by the Border Patrol after the visit showed Wolf and Tucson Sector Chief Roy Villareal boarding a helicopter to get a closer look at construction.

At one point, the video focuses on Bavoquivari Peak, a prominent landmark within the Tohono O’odham Nation that is located close to the construction activity at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument near Lukeville.

Crews are replacing 43 miles of barriers along that stretch of protected desert wilderness, despite concerns from the Tohono O’odham about the possible damage to several archaeological and cultural sites along the path of construction. The work is scheduled to wrap up around Election Day.

Wolf said President Donald Trump’s administration will continue building border barriers. As of Tuesday, crews had completed 181 miles, and were on track to build 400 miles of fencing by the end of the year, he added.

He also acknowledged that the Homeland Security Department was considering the possibility of painting the border wall black, an idea that Trump has allegedly pushed for, according to multiple reports.

“As we know the wall itself can rust. There is a useful life cycle of the wall,” he said. “So how do we get a longer life span out of the wall? If that means if we can paint it, and it prolongs the life, then we’ll do just that.”

Critics of border wall construction denounced Tuesday’s visit.

U.S. Rep. Raúl Grijalva — Arizona’s most senior Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation and a frequent Trump critic whose district includes most of the sites Wolf visited — lambasted the trip and ongoing construction at the border.

Grijalva noted that Arizona still lags behind the country in testing capabilities and medical resources for COVID-19, and said the acting secretary’s visit on Tuesday was “a pathetic attempt” to deflect from Trump’s muchcriticized response to the pandemic.

“This is particularly concerning in small border communities where construction crews continue work on the wall with little regard to social distancing guidance,” he said. “While Trump and Republicans resist calls for more money to address the pandemic, there seems to be endless amounts of money to construct the border wall.”

Several environmental groups, led by the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday morning against Wolf and senior Pentagon officials, arguing the transfer of $7.2 billion from the Defense Department’s Fiscal Year 2020 budget to build additional barriers at the U.S.-Mexico border is unlawful.

Two federal judges in San Francisco and El Paso, Texas, sided with the groups in a similar lawsuit targeting $6.7 billion diverted from the 2019 budget for border wall construction.

But the Supreme Court and an appeals court in New Orleans stayed their rulings, pending a government appeal, allowing for construction to continue.

The border wall projects Wolf toured on Tuesday are funded by the money transferred from the 2019 budget.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers awarded $1.3 billion to Albuquerquebased company Southwest Valley Constructors to build the 43 miles of fencing in Organ Pipe, as well as 20 miles in Cochise County, including in the endangered San Pedro River.

Wolf ’s visit on Tuesday is the second to the Arizona-Mexico border this year.

The acting secretary’s last trip to Arizona was in January to tour wall construction in Yuma.