On a warm Saturday afternoon this month, and a group of musicians fought against the wind underneath a pop-up tent set up right along the border — in the San Rafael Valley.
Rolling grassland stretched out into Mexico and on either side of the dirt road, where dozens of people were gathered to take stock of the remote and rugged strip of wilderness.
“To me, it reminds me of the midwestern states of the United States,” said Austin Nuñez, chairman of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s San Xavier District, near Tucson. “It’s just prairie, prairie grass, prairie lands, rolling hills, and I can just imagine when the bison were roaming through here.”
Nuñez shielded his eyes from the sun and looked out at towering mountain ranges called sky islands on the horizon. They’re biodiversity hotspots that are found only here, in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, and host endangered cross-border species like jaguars. Tohono O’odham schoolchildren and elders named a young male that scientists tracked traveling through these ranges just last year.
We’re about 60 miles east, as the crow flies, of where the Tohono O’odham Nation's stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border begins. But this is part of the tribe’s ancestral land. Nuñez remembers his mother gathering yucca from the mountains here to make baskets — and thanking the plants she collected.
“So we have that relationship with nature, and if it wasn’t for nature, we as humans probably wouldn’t survive. We wouldn’t be here,” he said.
'A continent-wide border wall'
Almost 230 miles of the Arizona-Mexico border was lined with a 30-foot steel bollard wall during the first Trump administration — part of a project that cost roughly $15 billion and covered just over 450 miles. So environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief when the San Rafael Valley was left unwalled back then.
“You know, this was a place that we really crossed our fingers would not get a contract during the first Trump administration, and it didn’t,” said Russ McSpadden, southwest conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity.
But that’s changing now. A new segment of the 30-foot steel bollard wall was greenlit for 27 miles of the valley earlier this year. Construction began in September.
McSpadden is walking along the construction line, where big yellow earth-movers are resting for the weekend and a new section of the bollard wall that’s been painted black looms above. A cement trench runs underneath it and it’s topped with metal plates.
The North Dakota-based Fisher Sand & Gravel was awarded a more than $309 million contract to do this work after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the agency was using an old federal statute to waive a host of federal laws to speed up wall building here, in June.
Last month, she issued border-wide waivers eliminating procurement laws the federal government is normally required to follow when soliciting and choosing contractors.
“From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, so the entire width of the continent of North America between those two points,” he said. “Never before, I think, have they made so clear that their intention is a continent-wide border wall.”
Noem’s waiver authority stems from a law called the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which gave federal agencies the ability to waive the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Protection Act. An amendment made by Congress in 2005 gave agency heads like Noem the authority to waive dozens more laws to speed up wall construction anywhere along the border.
In a lawsuit filed over the San Rafael Valley wall project, the Center for Biological Diversity and another group argue that amendment is unconstitutional.
Tala DiBenedetto, a staff attorney with the group who is working on the case, says that amendment is tantamount to giving legislative authority to an unelected official.
“Our lawsuit challenges the current iteration of IRIRA, which is incredibly broad,” she said. “This authority, that allows the secretary of Homeland Security to waive all legal requirements that she deems, in her sole discretion, are necessary to build these walls and roads without any knowledge of what laws are being waived or the harm that will be done as a result is what we are currently challenging in court.”
More deer than people
Neither Customs and Border Protection or DHS responded to questions about the progress of the San Rafael Valley wall project or the lawsuit against it.
But when issuing the waiver for new build, DHS said the San Rafael wall was needed to combat “high illegal entry attempts” and narcotics smuggling in the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.
Eamon Harrity, wildlife program manager with the environmental advocacy group Sky Island Alliance, says that doesn’t bear out on the ground.
His group has set up about 75 trail cameras to track movement in the valley for the last five years. He says they see roughly 5 people a month.
“That’s not per camera, that’s across all cameras. And roughly half of those people are recreators, Border Patrol, hunters and hikers,” he said.
What they do see, Harrity says, is animal traffic, tons of it. Each month, their cameras capture some 200 deer alone.
“It’s roughly 44 times as many deer as people per month on our cameras,” he said.
The cameras show that animals adapt when they can. Wildlife corridors the size of a sheet of paper were cut through some steel bollards of the first Trump administration’s wall and have helped species like javelina pass through. But those are too small for animals like bears and male mountain lions — a problem Harrity assumes will also apply to jaguars. Their research predicts animal crossings will drop by about 86% in the San Rafael Valley with the existence of a wall.
“We know from recent evidence from this year, 2025, that jaguars are moving through the Huachuca mountains right where the construction will pass,” he said.
Back in the San Rafael Valley, metal bollards cast shadows across the road as Kii’yaa’nii Ross read a speech she’d prepared before joining her mother to perform a traditional dance along the construction line — where the old vehicle barriers meet the new wall.
“Those borders are invisible to our Indigenous people, and that includes all animals, those man-made borders hurt our wildlife, our plants, our animals and our people,” Ross told the group. “Mother Earth and water are not just resources that we need to survive. They are sacred beings that my Indigenous people and ancestors have always been in connection with and respected.”
A pair of Mexican brothers from a few miles down the road in Santa Cruz, Sonora, helped hand out fresh burritos across the international boundary and talked to demonstrators on the U.S. side.
Myles Traphagen, borderlands program coordinator with the Wildlands Network, says ultimately there may not be much people can do to stop this wall.
“All we can do is appreciate it for what it is now, and make sure that this cultural memory and historical memory is not lost. So that people know that this is not a normal time, this is not a normal thing to do to the land,” he said.
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