One of the last wild open spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border is being blown up right now by crews who are building a border wall at a furious pace.
It’s in Coronado National Memorial in southeastern Arizona — funded by more than $46 billion in federal dollars from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed through Congress last year.
During President Donald Trump’s first term, areas like these — mountainous, environmentally sensitive — were left out of the campaign to build a border wall. But not anymore.
And Nick Miroff on Wednesday morning got a first-hand look at the demolition that’s taking place — and its environmental stakes.
Miroff is a staff writer at the Atlantic who covers immigration and he joined The Show to talk more.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, Nick. Thanks for coming on The Show.
NICK MIROFF: Good morning. Good to be with you.
GILGER: So you were there watching some of this demolition taking place. Just tell us first, you know, what you saw.
MIROFF: Yeah, so I was watching from an overlook at Coronado National Memorial, as you say, right along the U.S.-Mexico border where the Trump administration's crews are blowing up parts of national parkland to sort of smooth out the path for the construction of the border wall.
And this is part of a segment that goes right through the middle of the San Rafael Valley in southern Arizona. And this is, as you said, one of the last open rangelands in this part of really along the entire U.S.-Mexico border and was one of those kind of remote and sensitive areas that, that was, you know, didn't get touched during his first administration.
But now that, you know, the administration has all this money to spend, it is building 30-foot, you know, black, black painted border wall right through the middle of this, this area.
GILGER: Right. How many miles are they planning on building in this area?
MIROFF: So this segment is about 30 miles. It goes from the Huachuca Mountains at Coronado National Memorial and connects all the way go over through the Patagonia Mountains across the San Rafael Valley. And you know, that's going to connect on the other side with the segments that are east of Nogales.
GILGER: Right. And you mentioned it's painted black. Why is that?
MIROFF: The president has insisted that the border wall be painted black because he thinks it's going to be hotter to the touch and that he likes the way it looked. It was never part of the Border Patrol initial plan for the barrier.
It adds a lot of maintenance costs. It doesn't actually increase the temperature of the steel. And what I've, what I've observed over the years is almost as soon as they, they put it out there in the desert, it starts to peel.
GILGER: So let's talk about where this is a little bit more. You mentioned it's really remote. Is this a place where we have traditionally seen a lot of border crossings?
MIROFF: No, this is one of these areas that was never a priority for the Border Patrol in terms of construction because it doesn't have a lot of either, you know, drug smuggling activity or, you know, migrants crossing. Part of that is because Highway 2 on the Mexican side of the border, which, you know, is the main kind of east-west corridor in northern Mexico, it isn't anywhere near the San Rafael Valley. It goes far south of the border there.
And so there aren't a lot of crossings there. There has not been a big need for, you know, a heavy enforcement presence. And since CBP installed the camera towers years ago, it's been pretty quiet.
GILGER: Right, right. You write about just how much the kind of reasoning from the Trump administration has changed here. Like, during the president's first term, areas like these were left alone for reasons like that.
Why do they say they're building this now?
MIROFF: Well, I mean, yeah, you, I mean, you can remember Trump's first Homeland Security secretary in his first term, John Kelly, used to say, we don't need a border wall from sea to shining sea. And there were restraints on, on the, you know, the kind of ambitions of the project. Some of them were financial restraints, but they were also some common sense restraint to actually try to build through these very steep, rugged, mountainous areas where few people try to cross.
But all that thinking is now out the window because the administration has all this money to spend $46 billion. And so, you know, they, the sky is the limit and they're, they're just going to blast their way right, right through these remote areas in order to complete the president's vision for a, for a massive border wall.
GILGER: Right. And this is just a small part of that big vision, right. So you talk about some of the environmental impact plans to even go through places like the Tohono O'odham Reservation, which sits along the border, which has been exempt in the past. This is a national memorial, as we mentioned.
What about environmental protection laws?
MIROFF: Those have been waived by, by the administration. So there's really no, there's no restraints that are, that are on, you know, Customs and Border Protection to, to issue these contracts to hire these companies to dynamite the land and build the, you know, in a place like the San Rafael Valley, where water is, you know, a lifeblood.
And it's so crucial to not only the ranchers but also, the wildlife in this area, they're pumping groundwater at a furious pace out of this aquifer in order to mix concrete to build the wall. And so, you know, these areas are going to be increasingly stressed because the water is being used for border wall construction.
GILGER: There are lawsuits from environmental groups over this. You talk about how this is where jaguars have been spotted kind of returning to the region.
I want to ask you, before I let you go, about some time you spent with one of these environmental folks along the border who has put cameras along the border wall, sort of documenting where wildlife is being blocked. And he also documented a place where people were not being blocked, but wildlife were.
MIROFF: Yeah, I'll try to describe this quickly, but we went out to check some border wall. I'm sorry, checked some trail cameras that, that have been set up at some openings. They're called floodgates, and they're, during monsoon season, they're left open by the Border Patrol so that the border wall doesn't get knocked down by all the debris coming down the washes, you know, during the monsoons.
And so he has a camera set up at one of these and periodically checks to see. And what we saw was a mountain lion approaching the border wall, finding its path blocked and, you know, looking very confused by this structure suddenly cutting off its habitat.
And on the same camera, not long after, we saw an image of four men wearing camouflage rappelling down, lowering themselves on ropes. And so here you have a border wall not stopping the people that it was designed to stop, but blocking the path of large, you know, species like mountain lions.
GILGER: Quite a contrast.
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