The destructive legacy of Trump’s border wall

The ruggedly beautiful but inhospitable wilderness of Otay Mountain is home to dozens of threatened species, including the endangered Quino checkerspot butterfly and some of the last remaining Tecate cypress, a tree that dates back to the Ice Age. It is also “tarantula-infested” and a habitat for rattlesnakes, with treacherous, rocky inclines prone to slippage.

But like dozens of other places along the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border, under the Trump administration this remote area on Tijuana’s outskirts became a construction site for the then president’s “big, beautiful wall”.

To expedite the wall’s construction, Donald Trump declared a state of emergency at the border – despite the number of undocumented people entering the US being at the lowest level in a decade. Environmental impact studies, which typically accompany large federal projects, were bypassed with a 2005 national security waiver, allowing the government to manoeuvre around dozens of federal laws that were supposed to protect the land, endangered wildlife, clean water and air.

Heavy machinery rolled on to Otay Mountain in 2019 and began gouging a path into the steep valleys, increasing the risk of erosion by scraping out vegetation, and blasting dynamite through rocks to level the land.

The 30ft, narrowly spaced, steel bollard fencing, embedded in tonnes of concrete, is a particularly poignant example of the former president’s fatuous crusade. The fencing teeters over the mountain and down a steep incline before there’s a gap of several hundred feet until the next section of fence.

The Independent watched the incongruous scene of two individuals – who appeared to be border officials from Mexico and the US – engaging in a friendly chat in the middle of this void.

© Provided by The Independent Officials speak in the gap at the US-Mexico border wall, on the outskirts of Tijuana, Mexico (The Independent)

“When you see a wall in the middle of a mountain, it shows the ridiculousness of having these walls in the first place,” says Daniel Watman, from the Friends of Friendship Park Coalition, which celebrates the shared culture of those on either side of the border.

“All that destruction – and it hasn’t really stopped anyone from crossing anyway,” he tells The Independent.

For many years, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had been reluctant to put a border barrier in the Otay Mountain area.

“At the mountain range, you simply don’t need a fence. It’s such harsh terrain it’s difficult to walk, let alone drive. There’s no reason to disrupt the land when the land itself is a physical barrier,” said Richard Kite, a spokesperson for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the federal law enforcement agency overseen by DHS, in 2006.

The cost of such challenging construction work is unclear. The US Army Corps of Engineers, which leads federal construction projections, did not respond at the time of publication. However, in California’s Jacumba wilderness, an equally remote area to the west, the Trump wall reportedly cost $49m (around £35m) per mile.

Despite some conservative claims that the southern border is “wide open”, there were 650 miles of barrier when Mr Trump took office. Between San Diego, California and the Mexican city of Tijuana, some 12 miles of double fencing runs from a beach on the edge of the Pacific to the port of entry at Otay Mesa.

© Provided by The Independent Recent construction converting a flood control levee near Abram, Texas into a ‘levee-border wall’. The slope of the former levee is indicated by the grassy slope on right (Scott Nichol)

‘Virtually impenetrable’?

In all, 458 miles of “barrier system” were added during the Trump administration – 85 miles in new locations and 373 miles of updates.

And no, Mexico did not pay for it. American taxpayers did – however, some of the $15bn allocated has been diverted to other projects by Joe Biden.

Mr Trump said he had made the border “virtually impenetrable” but, like the wall, this claim has holes. A section in Texas, which cost $27m per mile, was reportedly breached by $5 handmade ladders in April.

“Ladders and walls go together like peas and carrots,” one border agent quipped. Other reports note that smugglers are using DIY-store power tools to saw through panels.

This is before the tunnels are taken into account. Between 1990 and 2016, 224 tunnels were discovered along the southern border, some as deep as 70ft.

© Provided by The Independent Border wall construction in the Otay Mountain wilderness involved heavy machinery and blasting dynamite. The fencing has been left with a large gap (The Independent)

“Undocumented workers and drugs will still find their way across any barrier the administration ends up building,” Vanda Felbab-Brown from Brookings policy institute wrote in 2017.

“And such a wall will be irrelevant to those people who become undocumented immigrants by overstaying their visas – who for many years have outnumbered those who become undocumented immigrants by crossing the US-Mexico border.”

Mother Nature has also had a say. Relatively mild winds of 37mph blew over sections of wall in California in January 2020. In August, metal flood gates in the wall near Tucson, Arizona, were ripped from their hinges by historic monsoon rains.

‘Like building a 30ft wall along Arlington Cemetery’

But the wall has brought its own severe repercussions. “Build the wall” became the rallying cry of Mr Trump’s nativist and divisive 2016 election campaign, marked by his racist outbursts that included calling Mexicans “rapists” and suggesting that they were “bringing drugs, bringing crime” to the US.

The wall acted as a gateway drug for some of his administration’s most fervent acolytes, who helped introduce “zero tolerance” polices like intentionally separating families at the southern border.

The parents or legal guardians of 303 separated, migrant children are yet to be found, according to a recent court filing. This number still vastly understates the problem, according to Lee Gelernt, lead lawyer on family separation at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“We have not even located 303 families, but hundreds more families who we have located still remain separated. Our hope is that, through our negotiations with the Biden administration, we finally can now quickly begin reuniting the families we have contacted,” he wrote in an email to The Independent.

© Provided by The Independent Recent construction converting a flood control levee near Abram, Texas into a ‘levee-border wall’. The slope of the former levee is indicated by the grassy slope on right (Scott Nichol)

The wall has also succeeded in carving a brutal scar across hundreds of miles of unique mountain and desert landscape, including Otay Mountain, New Mexico’s Chihuahuan desert, the Sky Islands of Arizona and the Lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

Reference: Independent: Louise Boyle