The Border Wall Is Back

Photographs by Philip Cheung At Coronado National Memorial in Arizona, the demolition crews blowing up national-park land tend to announce explosions at least a day in advance, as a warning for hikers to stay away. The crews have been working their way up the western slope of the park for the past couple of months, right along the international boundary with Mexico. President Trump’s border wall needs a smooth, straight path, and there are mountains in the way. Trump didn’t build along this stretch of the border during his first term, but his crews are now working at a furious pace. They have already completed about five miles of 30-foot-tall barrier, painted jet black at the president’s insistence because he thought it looked more intimidating and would be hotter to the touch. I watched them on a recent afternoon from an overlook, at a safe distance from the blast. To the west was the San Rafael Valley, a rolling yellow grassland that is one of the last wild open spaces along the U.S.-Mexico border. Ringed by mountains, it has served as a setting for John Wayne Westerns and episodes of Little House on the Prairie. I saw no power lines, paved roads, or other signs of human presence, aside from the new camp where Trump’s workers were sleeping in trailers and crushing rocks to make concrete for the wall’s base. They had about 20 more miles to go to finish the whole valley, one of the last places in southeast Arizona that hasn’t been walled off. Trump spent about $11 billion to build 450 miles of border barrier in his first term, one of the most expensive federal-infrastructure projects in U.S. history. He faced a lot of pushback too. The federal government shut down in December 2018 for a then-record 35 days when Democrats refused to give Trump $5 billion for border-wall funding. But last summer, Trump got nearly 10 times that amount for the wall—$46.5 billion—when Republicans pushed through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The money has imbued the project with an aura of inevitability, wiping away the financial and topographical considerations that restrained Trump’s first-term ambitions. John F. Kelly, Trump’s first homeland-security secretary, used to say that building a wall “from sea to shining sea” made no sense over steep mountain ranges where few people enter illegally. Construction through those areas can be wildly expensive, costing more than $40 million a mile. It’s one reason that some of the border’s most scenic and environmentally sensitive areas, including the Big Bend region in Texas, were spared the first time around. But that kind of reasoning, in Trump’s second term, is being blown up too.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic Wild jaguars from Mexico have been returning to Arizona through rugged mountains that span the border.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic Border wall panels ready for installation.

A month earlier, just over the next mountain range, Kristi Noem had used the border wall as the backdrop for a speech intended to help save her job as secretary of homeland security. Polls showed that Americans worried that Trump’s immigration crackdown had gone too far, especially after federal agents killed two U.S. citizens. The president appeared to agree, dispatching his “border czar,” Tom Homan, to take over ICE operations in Minneapolis. In Arizona, Noem tried to refocus attention on what the administration regards as a signature success. She declared that the wall will protect the country “for generations to come” and that its intimidating color looks “like the strength and stamina that the American people have.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the branch of the Department of Homeland Security that awards the construction contracts, has outlined plans for about 1,200 additional miles of steel barrier, which it has rebranded as a “Smart Wall” with cameras, lighting, and sensors. This includes installing double-layer fencing—parallel 30-foot-tall black-steel barriers with a road in between—across more than 600 miles of the border, much of it in Arizona. The plan calls for the wall to cut through the once-exempted tribal lands of the Tohono O’odham. As in Trump’s first term, DHS has issued waivers exempting the project from environmental laws and other protections. With the country’s immigration debate mostly focused on the ICE crackdown in U.S. cities, the president’s border-wall plans have garnered little attention and generated few protests. When Trump first proposed the wall, in 2015, it was a blunt solution to a complex crisis at the border. He rode into office on chants of “Build the wall!” and plowed through obstacles to make it happen. Now back in office and freed of his first-term limits, he has turned its completion—even through remote areas—into a vanity project. [Read: ‘Maybe DHS was a bad idea’] The border has been mostly quiet. During the past year, illegal crossings have plummeted to the lowest levels since the 1960s. That crackdown has been more bureaucratic than physical. Trump shut down the U.S. asylum system to end what he calls “catch and release,” in which someone who enters illegally can express fear of persecution in their home country and remain in the United States with a pending humanitarian claim. The wall itself had little apparent role in the turnaround. Record numbers of illegal border crossings occurred under President Biden, after Trump had built hundreds of miles of barrier during his first term. And the sharp decline in crossings during the past year happened before Trump’s construction crews got to work. CBP officials say that their goal is “100 percent operational control” of the border, meaning zero illegal crossings. Whether the wall can achieve that or not, the project is now driven by a kind of Trumpian manifest destiny. When CBP developed its border-wall master plan at the beginning of Trump’s first term, the agency identified about 20 locations as top priorities, all of them areas that had high numbers of illegal crossings and drug smugglers. Those were mostly places where Mexico’s Highway 2 closely approaches the border as it runs east–west for more than 1,200 miles, linking the manufacturing hubs of Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and other Mexican border cities. The highway’s close proximity to U.S. territory has long been a challenge for the Border Patrol because it allows traffickers to drop off migrants and drug mules within a few hundred feet of the international boundary. But not in the San Rafael Valley. Highway 2’s path veers about 40 miles south, away from the border, and large, privately owned ranches act as a buffer, limiting illegal crossings. The valley wasn’t on the priority list, and it was skipped over for border-wall construction during Trump’s first term. But now, CBP’s priority is to please the White House by building as many miles of wall as quickly as it can. And the valley is an easy place—relatively flat and accessible—to quickly increase its tally. The 27-mile span is being constructed by the North Dakota–based Fisher Sand & Gravel, which was awarded a $309 million contract last summer. The company, owned by Tommy Fisher, first started building on the border during Trump’s first term, when Fisher was hired by the We Build the Wall campaign, co-led by Steve Bannon, which raised more than $25 million to finance construction. In 2020, federal prosecutors charged Bannon and three others with fraud for personally enriching themselves. Trump gave Bannon a preemptive pardon. The others were convicted. Fisher, who was not charged, went on to receive about $2 billion in border-wall contracts from the federal government during Trump’s first term. A canny pitchman, Fisher caught Trump’s attention by appearing on Fox News. I wrote to him about his company’s new work in the San Rafael Valley, but he hasn’t responded to my text messages since Trump returned to office.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic The Trump administration has added concertina wire to older border fencing that blocks vehicles but allowed wildlife to cross.

Thirty years ago this month, the Arizona rancher and hunting guide Warner Glenn came across a jaguar along a rocky outcrop in the Peloncillo Mountains, a few miles from the Mexico border, and snapped a picture. It was the first time that a wild jaguar had been photographed on U.S. soil. The animals are the largest cats in the Western Hemisphere, many weighing more than 200 pounds, and they once roamed widely across the American Southwest. They were wiped out on the U.S. side of the border decades ago—in the Grand Canyon, the last known jaguar was shot in 1932—but a small population has survived in northern Mexico. Border-crossing jaguars have been coming back to the United States since then, and nearly a dozen distinct individuals have been documented, mostly in southern Arizona. All have been solitary males, who typically wander in search of territory and mates. The cats appear to be reclaiming their historic range right at the moment when border-wall construction is poised to cut them off. While driving through the San Rafael Valley on a recent afternoon, I stopped in a grove of old sycamores near the border, where Kate Scott and Andrea Hoerr were setting up a protest camp to oppose wall construction. Scott, who has lived in the San Rafael Valley for 26 years, embraces a loose blend of art and activism. Instead of asking people to block the bulldozers or chain themselves to the barrier, she brought a jaguar puppet the size of a sofa and a truckload of colorful animal masks in preparation for an upcoming parade-and-protest march near the construction zone. “We’re trying to be very tactical,” Scott told me. “If the Border Patrol guys show up, we just say, Hey, we’re here. We love jaguars. So we’re sharing information, but it’s resistance too.” Scott said that when she looks at the border wall, she feels “physically sick.” On the road to her camp, I passed half a dozen flatbed trucks transporting steel panels to a staging lot along the border. There were hundreds of wall panels stacked in the grass, waiting to be hoisted up and plugged into the ground like a giant picket fence. I asked Scott if she had resigned herself to the inevitability of the border wall. “I refuse to allow people to take our land, annihilate our animals, our plants, our water,” she said. “I do not accept that as my reality. And if more people started to understand that it’s not our reality to accept, they will come up with ways to push back.” The border wall has gotten lost in the avalanche of other outrageous things that Trump is doing, Scott said.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic Wild pronghorn in Mexico, viewed from the San Rafael Valley in Arizona.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic A new segment of the 30-foot-tall border wall through the San Rafael Valley.

As we spoke, a Border Patrol agent in a Chevy Tahoe rumbled past. For a decade or so, the agency has secured the San Rafael Valley, as well as other remote areas of the border, by using less imposing tools than a wall. It installed low-slung barriers that block smugglers from driving vehicles into the United States but allow wildlife to cross. CBP has also mounted powerful surveillance cameras on towers, and the newest versions of the technology can distinguish between people and animals. Zay Hartigan—the local fire chief, who has lived in the valley for 30 years—told me that those surveillance towers have kept smugglers away. The wall “is just a waste of money,” he said, and looks to him like a “big black scar” across the valley. The mountains of the desert Southwest follow a basin-and-range pattern along a north–south axis, forming a tenuous bridge between the Rockies and the Sierra Madre for wildlife. There’s enough precipitation at higher elevations to sustain meadows and forests of pine, Douglas fir, and other temperate species. Conservation biologists refer to these microclimates as “sky islands” because they function not unlike an archipelago, in which some species develop in isolation, separated by wide desert plains. For larger, more itinerant fauna, such as the jaguar, the mountains serve as highways, allowing them to island-hop and venture great distances with less risk of human contact and cars. [Read: Every state is a Border Patrol state]

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic Zay Hartigan, a San Rafael cowboy and fire chief, on the ranch where he lives and works.

Because the border wall runs east to west, it cuts their range in two. At some locations, small openings were added at the base of the wall to allow some wildlife to squeeze through, but the passages are too narrow for humans—and jaguars. Facing lawsuits from environmental groups, the Biden administration agreed to leave open some of the car-size swinging gates installed where the border wall crosses a dry wash or stream bed. During Arizona’s summer downpours, these water channels carry flash floods with torrents of mud and debris that can topple the wall. Myles Traphagen, a biologist and a border-wall opponent, said agents have been closing the gates more often since Trump returned to office. Traphagen came to the Southwest in the late 1990s, after serving in the Coast Guard in California, and became a “desert rat,” someone who spends their life outdoors, exploring public lands. He works for the environmental group Wildlands Network, which has installed trail cameras to monitor how wildlife interact with the border wall. The footage has shown black bears, bobcats, turkeys, javelinas, and other species trying to squeeze through the bars, or having their path blocked. Traphagen took me to check on a set of cameras placed along a section of wall that was built during Trump’s first term east of Douglas, so we followed the border road up and over steep grades. He removed a memory card from one such camera, which was concealed in a rock pile at the base of a dry wash, pointed at one of the closed floodgates. Soon his laptop screen began filling with thumbnail images, most of them recorded at night. There were many unremarkable clips: moths looping past the lens, tumbleweeds caught in the bars, a mouse scurrying back and forth between the two countries. Traphagen scrolled through these quickly. Then he stopped on a clip from early last month. A large mountain lion appeared in the frame, looking around skittishly, then up and down the wall, clearly confused—its path blocked. Another video showed a mountain-lion kitten trotting along the base of the wall through the same area. Footage captured by a second camera nearby showed a mother and kitten on opposite sides of the barrier. They seemed to be separated, though the kitten was clearly small enough to pass between the bars. The mother made a faint sound, almost like a pinging noise, to call it. “These animals are cut off from their migration routes, their hunting routes, and the places where they obtain water, food, and shelter,” Traphagen said. “So it’s hard to say: Is this animal stuck on the U.S. side? Are there other ones stuck on the Mexico side?” Traphagen resumed scrolling, then stopped again. There were three men with climbing gear, wearing camouflage clothing. A fourth lowered himself into the frame, rappelling down the wall, and began to loosen his harness. The group passed the equipment back through the wall to waiting hands on the Mexico side. Were they migrants? Drug smugglers? It was impossible to know. The wall here had blocked a mountain-lion family, but not the humans that it was meant to stop.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic Water is scarce in the high desert. Construction crews are pumping a million gallons of groundwater to mix concrete for the border wall.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic Trump is installing miles of black-painted border wall through Arizona's San Rafael Valley, one of the last open grasslands along the U.S.-Mexico border.

In 2018, when border-wall construction was just getting under way during Trump’s first term, I spent a day driving around with Rodney Scott, who was then the top Border Patrol official in San Diego. Tall and blond, with a fondness for aviator sunglasses that made him look like an extra from Top Gun, Scott spoke convincingly of the transformative effect of border barriers, helping agents reduce illegal crossings. Property values near the border had risen, even on the Mexican side, because fewer smugglers were trying to get through, Scott told me. Scott is now the commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Trump official responsible for keeping wall construction on track. Noem’s team tried to place blame internally on Scott for not building fast enough, but I’ve met few homeland-security officials over the years who have believed more fervently in the wall. During Trump’s first term, when I wrote articles in The Washington Post about how smugglers had learned to saw through the barrier with power tools, and how they were using cheap ladders and ropes to climb over it, Scott sent me disapproving messages. He told me that I was biased against the wall. [Read: Why Trump changed his mind on Kristi Noem] When I asked CBP about the need for a border wall in the San Rafael Valley, the agency sent me a statement from Scott. “We are building faster and smarter than ever before to ensure there are no gaps and no easy pathways for illegal entry,” the statement said. “A wall isn’t meant to stand alone—it slows and deters illegal crossings and buys our agents time.” I’ve been reporting along the border for more than 20 years, and I can see the value of barriers in urban areas such as El Paso and San Diego, where people can cross quickly and evade capture. I also recognize that rank-and-file border agents generally like having a big fence that buffers them from potential threats on the other side. But having watched Trump use the wall as a political tool and an opportunity for self-aggrandizement—autographing plaques with black Sharpie at multiple locations—I also know that the barrier is hardly a neutral object of federal infrastructure. The ranchers, landowners, and other San Rafael Valley residents I spoke with tended to view the wall through a partisan lens, struggling to separate the barrier from the man building it. Many who have spent their life admiring the open range described it as a kind of cultural and aesthetic injury. “It’s ugly, and it’s un-American,” David Hathaway, the sheriff of Arizona’s Santa Cruz County, told me when I visited his office in Nogales. Hathaway’s family settled in the nearby San Rafael Valley five generations ago. After a career as a DEA agent, Hathaway ran for county sheriff as a Democrat, winning in a district that is 95 percent Hispanic. He still owns ranch land in the San Rafael Valley, where his ancestors are buried in a family cemetery near the border. “My whole life, I’ve been going out there,” he told me. Hathaway scoffed at claims that the area needs a wall for better security. “At night you go out there, and it’s just dark and pristine and beautiful and safe,” he said. “There’s not just marauding criminals or anything like that.” Most landowners in the San Rafael Valley don’t want to talk about the border wall, because the project has divided neighbors and split friendships, the rancher and conservationist Ross Humphreys told me. “Almost everybody out here wants to keep their head down in regards to the politics,” he said.

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic Ross Humphreys, a conservationist and former photographer who owns the historic San Rafael Ranch.

In 2000, he bought the historic San Rafael Ranch, which spans about 20,0000 acres and is home to six endangered species. He has been restoring the grasslands and raising premium Black Angus cattle. Humphreys has seen the valley turn hotter and drier since he bought the ranch, and less surface water runs in the Santa Cruz River. He worries that the border wall is exacerbating those trends. The river starts in the San Rafael Valley, crosses the border into Mexico, and then loops back into Arizona. Construction of the wall requires hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day to make concrete, and the crews have drilled wells into the valley floor. Fisher’s construction crew told Humphreys that they’re pumping 800 gallons of water a minute, which adds up to more than 1 million gallons a day. Farther east, where Trump put up dozens of miles of border wall outside Douglas during his first term, construction crews tapped into the natural springs that feed the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, one of the only natural watering holes for miles around. Contractors pumped millions of gallons out of the springs in 2019 and 2020 to mix concrete for the base of the wall, triggering a pressure drop that left the springs dry. The government has had to install pumps to bring water to the surface for animals to drink and to keep endangered species alive. “I have one well that went dry on its own,” Humphreys said. “I’ve got another one I’m worrying about down on the border. What happens if these guys pump it dry? I’ve got all these aquatic-dependent endangered species on the ranch. They’re at risk. But they’re only at risk the day the water stops. And nobody is monitoring it.”

Philip Cheung for The Atlantic “At night you go out there, and it’s just dark and pristine and beautiful and safe,” said Sheriff David Hathaway.

I went back to the overlook at Coronado National Memorial a few days later, ahead of another scheduled detonation. The blasting area had been cleared, and there was a cluster of white pickup trucks parked a few hundred yards away in a safety zone along the border road. Suddenly, the ground heaved upward, and was followed by the sound of the blast and the patter of broken rocks landing on the slope and spilling down the side. I watched a cloud of dust drift down the mountain, into Mexico, until the air was clear again. After a few minutes, a large earthmover began clattering up the mountain toward the blast site. The machine climbed higher, groaning and beeping. It lurched into the rock pile and started pushing the debris down the slope, out of the way. I’d always heard the San Rafael Valley’s admirers claim that the landscape looked much as it did in 1540, when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition arrived. That wasn’t true anymore, not with the black-steel structure splitting the valley in two. I told Traphagen that it looked to me like a snake, arching up and down over the creek beds. The Tohono O’odham, Native people of the Sonoran Desert, have a prophecy about a giant, black serpent crawling across the land at the end of the world, he said. Trump’s wall wasn’t finished yet, but it was already the end of something. The valley had been shaped across tens of millions of years, by volcanoes, floods, earthquakes. Native peoples, Spanish explorers, Mexican settlers, Apache warriors, cowboys, and mountain bikers all passed through. None of them has left anything as immense and lasting as what Trump is building.