Riding horseback along the 18-foot border wall in Southern Arizona’s Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke talked border security with Tucson Sector Border Chief Patrol Agent Rodolfo Karisch during Zinke’s first official visit to the border, on March 17.
“Clearly, border protection is mine and the president’s priority,” Zinke said, in front of the bollard-style border fence made of towering rust-red metal posts cutting through hills, rolling into the horizon. “Clearly, we’re supportive of a wall. Clearly, we’re supportive of multiple technologies.”
More than 80 percent of the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector is public land, of which 177 miles—stretching across national monuments, tribal lands and wildlife refuges—are managed by the Department of Interior.
“Clearly, you want to make sure that a barrier doesn’t adversely affect wildlife and takes into consideration the floodplains,” Zinke said.
Homeland Security has, in the past, waived environmental regulations to build border walls. The existing wall has already had adverse environmental effects, fragmenting habitats and wildlife corridors.
A 2011 study by the Journal of Conservation Biogeography estimated that 134 mammal, 178 reptile and 57 amphibian species live in close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, 50 of which are threatened species.
During monsoon season, the wall has become a dam, intensifying flooding. In the summer of 2008, debris piled up against the fence as water rose two to seven feet high, flooding the border towns of Lukeville, Arizona, and Sonoyta, Sonora, and eventually toppling the multi-million-dollar fence.
Environmental-protection organizations in the borderlands have long opposed a wall, including the Center for Biological Diversity.
“Zinke’s Arizona dog and pony show doesn’t change the fact that border walls are disasters for communities and wildlife,” said Randy Serraglio of the Center for Biological Diversity. “Public lands, people and animals are being sacrificed for Trump’s nativist campaign promise. Zinke is pandering and preening for cameras in a place he knows nothing about, while resistance to this destructive border wall grows stronger every day.”
Zinke said protecting the environment, despite the complications of a border wall, is important. But he’s leaving the best way to do that up to the experts.
“Mostly what I saw out there from environmental damage is the unconstrained illegal traffic and the trash left behind,” he said.
Karisch, who was showing Zinke around the border, said the footprint created by the wall is less damaging than the human traffic it has deterred.
The influx of Mexican immigrants peaked at more than 1 million in 2000, 50 percent of which overstayed visas, according to the Center for Migration Studies. In large part, this was due to Mexican workers feeling the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which shifted economies and destroyed livelihoods.
Since then, undocumented migration from Mexico steadily dropped to current levels, which are as low as the 1980s. Migrants crossing the desert borderlands now tend to be from Central American countries, where growing violence and gangs cause entire families to flee for their lives.
Another devastating effect of the wall is its contribution to pushing migrants crossing the desert into harsher terrain, decreasing their likelihood of survival. The Pima County Medical Examiner receives an average of 169 human remains a year from migrants who died while crossing the desert—a number that human-rights groups say is much lower than the total number of deaths.
Zinke said border security measures should include sustainable immigration policy.
“We love immigration,” he said. “Our country’s made of immigrants, so we have to have a policy that’s fair, that’s sustainable over the course of time.”
Leaving Buenos Aires, Zinke headed to the Tohono O’odham Nation, where people have been staunchly against a border wall on their tribal lands.
“It’s important for me to go down and talk to the great citizens of Arizona, talk to the tribes and get a tenor of what the temperament is, where there’s an opposition to fences,” Zinke said. “Our Native Americans have a strong opposition to fences. I’m going to talk to them about that, and then go back to Washington D.C. and talk to the president.”
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2018.
Tucson Weekly:
For Decades, YOU supporters of Tucson and Pima County “Open Border Cheap Mexican Labor Policy” and “Pro Raza Racists” have been waving Mexican Flags, and telling impoverished Mexican citizens:
“Viva la Raza! Come on in!!
You are welcome here!
You can take jobs from Gringos,
And have ALL the benefits of citizenship!”
And NOW you are surprised and dismayed THE WALL is going up?
Grow up, and take responsibility for the misery you’ve caused!
In other words, “OWN IT!”
The benefits of the wall stopping smugglers, gang members, criminals and terrorists far outweigh the problem of flooding dirt towns along the border. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
Actually, apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border are lower now than they’ve been since 1971. The border is safer now than it’s ever been, by any measure except one–more migrants are dying, even though the number of migrants crossing is a tiny fraction of what it was before the economic crash just ten years ago.
This is by design, of course. For a couple of decades now, the current policy has purposely driven migrant traffic out into dangerously remote, rugged terrain as a deterrent. The results of this “policy of deterrence” are not pretty. It has created a human smuggling industry that has provided narco-trafficking organizations with a lucrative new revenue source, and it drives migrants and the incredibly destructive enforcement activities that follow them onto public lands that are owned by all Americans–the natural heritage that Zinke and his Interior Department are supposed to protect.
The notion that what has now become a small trickle of migrants on foot somehow does more damage than border walls, forward operating bases and thousands of Border Patrol agents driving willy-nilly all over wildlife refuges and wilderness areas is laughable, and demonstrably false. In the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, data shows that the vast majority of thousands of miles of destructive new roads cut through what is supposed to be wilderness were created by Border Patrol, not by smugglers or migrants.
The sad part is that it’s totally unnecessary. If we had an immigration system that regulated immigrant labor in a rational way, with respect for its boon to the American economy and the human and civil rights of its participants, we wouldn’t have death and destruction in the beautiful borderlands. And 90 percent of the drugs that are smuggled into this country come through the ports of entry and would not be stopped by Tchump’s paranoid wall fantasy in any event.
You wanna stack the needs of the many against the needs of the few? In poll after poll, a solid majority of Americans are against the wall, because they’ve come to clearly understand that it’s an ineffective, incredibly wasteful and damaging way to deal with immigration.
Our craven politicians need to start listening to the many who clamor for humane immigration reform and stop listening to the few hateful, xenophobic, racist cowards who irrationally fear our neighbors to the south. Those “dirt towns” along the border that you’re so willing to cavalierly sacrifice for an illusion of security are full of real human beings who have a right to enjoy the same environmental protections that benefit all other Americans.
Whenever Zinke is photographed riding a horse there’s two horses asses in the picture.
Skinnyman, just out of curiosity do you have a fence or a wall around your home or complex ? Do some of your friends, neighbors, relatives, have fence’s or wall’s surroundings their place of residence ? And if they do, do you consider them or yourself for that matter, to be racist, cowards, hateful, xenophobic ? Isn’t it true that we feel far more secure by having a fence or wall around our home ? Some crazy people consider America to be their home and actually want a wall or barrier to secure their country, I guess that these group of deplorable individuals have lost touch with reality by thinking that a mere wall could help them feel safer. I’m tearing mine down today and I’m going to demand that my neighbor, friends and relatives do the same. Those racists S.O.B’s
Dave D. :
You are absolutely correct! Keeping others out of your own personal property is exactly the same as keeping the oppressed from other lands out of a country which has welcomed those looking for a better way of life. You is a geenius! Now tear down the wall that surrounds your house and donate it to your Piss-Orange skinned master so at least he will have something to show for all that useless twitting he does.
I still got the best of you on the topic. your method of humiliating someone else because he doesn’t agree with you on some issues is quite common. Ahh ! but it doesn’t work. Truth is what will prevail ! As far as welcoming those looking for a better life goes there is also an answer to your comment. It’s called legal immigration stand in line and wait for your name to be called. Do you suppose that Mexico would allow 11.000.000 or so undocumented Americans to enter into their country illegally and provide for them sanctuary cities, welfare, food stamps education, jobs do you really think they would ? Of course not, they’ve been taken advantage of their neighbors to the north for so many years that they actually believe they have a voice in our politics.
You got the best of nothing. Especially brains.
Dave D. They just hate it when we’re right. So, they resort to name calling. It’s the best they can do.
Hey lookie that… another guy that lacks brains and originality. You proved it by mentioning name calling. The only name I called Dave Dunce was a geenius. I guess you is a geenius also.
-No. It stands for wonder. As in ” I wonder what it feels to be such an asshole, as yourself.”
Hey lookie that…the other guy wonders what feels like to be such an asshole. C’mon, I already know that you know what it’s like to be such an asshole. You prove it practically anytime you decide to post on this site.
I guess Skinny man cannot accept the out come of the election. The American people made their choice of candidates. But some would argue that Hilary won the popular vote. But according to the rules of congress a presidential candidates win is determined by the electro college I guess skinny man is that type of individual that if his favorite football team is defeated by a foul during the game he becomes upset and wants to change the rules of The N.F.L. at the sound of the buzzard. Doesn’t work that way. So if the people made their choice to elect the piss orange guy to be their president then that’s just the way it is. Perhaps Skinny man has acquired by nature a higher I.Q. then myself. Maybe he has a gift, I don’t that. However, one thing he lacks is the ability to carry on an intellectual conversation that would shed some light on the ignorance of other’s and perhaps persuade them to change course.