The Damage and Destruction Are Trump's Monument

Trump's wall along the US-Mexico border was a linchpin of his 2016 presidential campaign.  It was to supposed to be a signature achievement of his presidency.  There were however some significant issues with his wall.  First, everyone who studies the issue of people illegally entering the US realize that most enter the US through ports of entry not via cross country treks.  Second, building the wall would require substantial eminent domain actions by the US government against US citizens to take their border adjacent land to build the wall.  And, finally, despite Trump's exclamations to the contrary, Mexico would not pay for the building of the wall.  

What all of this meant was that the only quick and dirty wall building Trump could use as evidence of his promised "great wall" was in the refurbishment of existing border barriers and that new wall construction was mostly relegated to public lands along the border.  Public lands that included areas of substantial conservation and cultural value.  None of this mattered to Trump and his wall obsessed MAGAs.

“(The administration) really started to push out into remote, rugged terrain on public lands all across the borderline in Arizona, where the ecological value of those places is so much higher that the damage done by this construction is much more egregious,” said Randy Serraglio, Southwest conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity.

For months now, construction crews have been dynamiting, drilling, pumping, excavating and clear-cutting public land. In places like Guadalupe Canyon in far eastern Arizona, simply building roads to bring in construction equipment involved blasting mountainsides and sending the rubble down to clog drainages. Previously wide-open landscapes where wildlife and water could move freely have been severed by the huge steel barrier. The Sonoran Desert’s iconic saguaros, protected by law, have been found lying in heaps next to construction sites.

“This is damage that will not ever be remediated or mitigated,” Serraglio said. “This is permanent.”