The Department of Homeland Security is waiving a host environmental and cultural protection laws to expedite new border wall construction projects in southern Arizona and New Mexico.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem issued waivers to fast-track 36 miles of new border wall in Arizona and New Mexico. It comes just a few months after a similar waiver to streamline construction in California.
A series of laws passed in the '90s gives DHS the legal authority to waive broad protection laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and bypass the assessment processes usually required ahead of construction on public land.
Erick Meza, borderlands program coordinator with the Sierra Club, says the latest projects include over 24 miles in the San Rafael Valley.
“I think this was kind of one of our biggest fears, for two reasons,” he said. “It’s a really large stretch of unwalled landscape, and the second is because of the importance of the landscape biologically speaking, and culturally speaking.”
Meza’s group and others have been in talks with CBP since last year trying to make recommendations for how to accommodate animals and water within that landscape, despite existing border barriers.
“It’s a very unique ecosystem that we have here in Arizona, and it’s also nestled in the middle of two sky islands,” Meza said.
Sky islands are mountains that are unique to Sonora and southern Arizona and feature radically different ecosystems in a single range. Meza said the ranges are critical habitat for cross-border animals like the jaguar and construction will sever connectivity of waterways that flow into both countries.
“This border wall will block the Santa Cruz [River] on its way down to Mexico, and it will also block it on its way up to the United States,” he said.
The Arizona construction includes border wall segments in CBP’s Tucson and Yuma sectors.
DHS says they’ll be funded with money appropriated to Customs and Border Protection in 2020 and 2021 for wall construction.
The Biden administration canceled the wall project and tried to divert that funding into other work along the border, like cleaning up extra construction materials. Last year, a federal court in Texas ruled it had to be used for additional wall construction.
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