HomeTop Storiesfears of wildlife at the border if Trump takes office

fears of wildlife at the border if Trump takes office

During Donald Trump’s first presidential term, he embarked on an ambitious and costly border militarization program, including the construction of more than 450 miles of wall that cut through wildlife corridors and fragmented ecosystems in some of the country’s most remote and biodiverse regions. With its second inauguration on Monday, environmentalists are bracing for any new phase of construction that could worsen the border wall’s ecological toll.

“It’s an absolute travesty and a disaster for the wildlife of the border,” said Margaret Wilder, a human-environment geographer and political ecologist at the University of Arizona, of the environmental impact of the existing border wall and the prospect of renewed build. She said the wall damaged efforts “after many decades of binational cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico to protect this fragile and biodiverse region. I don’t think the Americans realize what is at stake.”

What is at stake is the historically unprecedented separation of wildlife populations along the 600-mile pedestrian border wall — largely impenetrable to anything larger than a jackrabbit — built along the southern border. “This [the border wall] is a large-scale, uncontrolled experiment in the evolutionary history of borderland wildlife species,” said Laiken Jordahl, southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The places that remain unwalled are some of the most remote, rugged and important wildlife habitats we have left.”

New Mexico and Arizona have about 390 miles of pedestrian border wall, 260 miles of which were built during the first Trump administration.

A recent study by Wildlands Network and Sky Islands Alliance showed the impact of the pedestrian boundary wall (9 meter high steel pillars spaced 10 cm apart) on wildlife movement and habitat connectivity in the exceptionally biodiverse Sky Island region of Sonora, Mexico and the southwestern US. Motion-activated cameras placed along 100 miles of the Arizona border showed an 86% decrease in the number of wildlife crossings and a 100% decrease in the number of crossings for large animals such as bears, pronghorns and jaguars.

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“The Sky Islands are a crossroads on the mainland through which many different species, including humans, have migrated for millennia,” said Emily Burns, program director of the Sky Island Alliance. “Putting a continuous wall across the Arizona border is extremely bad for medium and large wildlife.”

All indications point to a continuation of Trump’s crackdown on immigration and the southern border. Trump has criticized the Biden administration’s auctioning of border wall materials, describing the sale as “almost a criminal act” that would cost taxpayers millions of dollars if Trump were to resume border wall construction. “They know we’re going to use it, and if we don’t have it, we’re going to have to rebuild it, and it’s going to cost double what it cost years ago,” Trump said.

However, the precise plans for the border wall remain unclear.

“No one has any idea what the hell is going to happen,” Jordahl said. “We are absolutely bracing for the worst.”

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The border wall was a signature priority of Trump’s first candidacy, made possible by the expanded powers Congress gave to the Department of Homeland Security. These powers made it possible to bypass federal laws to speed construction and strengthen border security through Customs and Border Protection, the nation’s largest law enforcement agency.

Ricky Garza, border policy advisor at the Southern Border Communities Coalition, has witnessed the steady advance of border militarization in the Rio Grande Valley.

“That whole area is just being choked with the presence of Border Patrol,” Garza said, referring to the growing number of green and white Border Patrol vehicles, immigration checkpoints and border infrastructure. “There is a physical occupancy structure that increases as you get closer to the border.”

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Texas has the most border with Mexico, but the fewest wall miles, as the border is formed by the Rio Grande and the land on the Texas side is largely privately owned. Building border walls is more common on federally owned lands, not because these are busy border crossings, but because building on private property is extremely difficult. During the Trump administration, 263 miles of pedestrian fencing and border wall were built, mostly in rural New Mexico and Arizona. Today, more than 60% of the Arizona border is walled.

“In those really remote, rugged areas, whether it was the mountains in Arizona and so on, there was no evidence of people trying to cross the border, at least not in numbers,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of Customs and Borders. Protection. “So why build a border wall in a place where you really don’t need it?”

When I visited the Arizona border in the final days of Trump’s first term, construction crews were blasting hilltops and raising mountainsides to complete disconnected sections of border walls in some of the most remote and impassable parts of the border.

Burns, of the Sky Island Alliance Program, fears construction could resume in these areas as federal laws governing barrier construction continue to lapse. “There are construction plans for the places where the wall has been demolished,” Burns said. “It seems entirely possible that old projects will simply be dusted off and reactivated.”

Kerlikowske is less sure about that. “Tom [Homan] made it clear that he wanted to sort of focus on the border as the borders are,” he said of Trump’s new “border czar.”

“What’s really troubling is that the parts of the border that they haven’t cordoned off in Arizona and New Mexico are some of the most sensitive places and important wildlife corridors for species like the black bear, jaguar and other mammals,” says Myles Traphagen, Borderlands. Program Coordinator for the Wildlands Network.

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That closure of unfenced areas would be a death blow to the elusive jaguar, which has reappeared in the US after being hunted to extinction in the 1960s.

“More [wall] would certainly deter jaguars from entering the US in the last corridors the country has from Sonora to Arizona,” Burns said. “When these animals move, it’s a lifeline for populations that are on the brink.”

Boundary construction is a bipartisan effort. The Obama administration built more than 100 miles of new border wall. Biden resumed construction in 2023 after efforts to redirect money earmarked for the wall in 2019 failed. “The money was earmarked for the border wall,” Biden said. “I can’t stop that.”

Since 2021, the agency has been prioritizing funding for barriers to close gaps and complete gates along the southern border, according to a CBP spokesperson. Of the 163 closures and gate projects approved since 2021, 119 have been completed.

Approximately 92 kilometers of new border barrier closures are planned. These projects are still in the environmental planning process and are expected to start in early 2025, according to the CBP.

Border barriers are deadly for wildlife and people. The border wall – and CBP’s decades of prevention through deterrence policies have pushed people into more dangerous and hostile territory.

“The border wall is an engine of death,” said Garza of the Southern Border Communities Coalition, as the southern border is now the deadliest land migration route in the world.

As Trump returns to power, he fears things will only get worse. “I don’t want my house to turn into a sacrifice zone, but that’s where we’re going.”

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