Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall

The Wall

THE WALL In the Pinacate Biosphere reserve in northern Sonora, Mexico, a bighorn ram heads north. Water sources in the western Sonoran Desert are few, especially in the summer, but water persists in rare locations, including the one he’s headed to a half-mile north in the Tinajas Altas Mountains in southwestern Arizona. On this trip the bighorn, one of Mexico’s most endangered species, brings his lambs and mates because summer requires frequent trips to water, and the young ones have not yet learned the route. Luckily for him, the map he carries in his head of the location of water, etched deep in memory from many hundreds of trips over his lifetime , has no markings of international boundaries; the only laws he obeys are the life-and-death laws of nature. Wild species like the desert bighorn that live in arid lands must make frequent use of scarce resources shared across the landscape. These creatures live on the very edge of existence, either by the nature of the land they inhabit, which is prone to drought and temperature extremes, or due to human disturbance, hunting, or habitat degradation. The Sonoran pronghorn, a subspecies of pronghorn that has adapted to life in the Sonoran Desert, is a creature of two binational distinctions: it is the fastest land mammal in both the United States and Mexico, and it is also one of the most endangered. Habitat loss t h e w a l l | 1 3 5 Bighorn sheep have become rare in the southwestern deserts and are nearly extinct in Mexico. The best hope for their continued survival is open travel corridors. These bighorn were photographed less than a mile from the border in southwestern Arizona. 1 3 6 and fragmentation from highways, livestock, agriculture, and military use of the land displaced pronghorn from much of their habitat and isolated them from others of their kind. Barely clinging to existence in the United States, the Sonoran pronghorn’s greatest hopes for escaping extinction are increased connectivity to the slightly larger and more genetically diverse population in Mexico, and decreased disturbance from humans in its habitat in the States. Life for the pronghorn, bighorn, and many others hinges on two countries figuring out a way to cooperate on habitat protection and restoration of migration corridors. Instead, in 2007 the United States started building a wall that separates the bighorn from the Tinajas Altas water, and the pronghorn from its extended family living south of the border. But the story of the border wall did not start there. US border policy began having disruptive and disturbing impacts on the wildlands of the border region in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration began a series of hard crackdowns on migrant workers coming through San Diego and El Paso. The crackdowns pushed desperate migrants looking for work—many of them farmers displaced by NAFTA—out into the deserts and other remote landscapes in the borderlands. In addition to the main target, immigrants, the policy also shifted drug trafficking routes. The heightened focus on enforcement in San Diego did not ultimately stop or even slow migrant traffic through the southern border. In fact, due to the economic factors that have always governed migration, the number of undocumented Mexican migrants in the United States increased in the 1990s—jumping from about two million individuals to almost five million by the year 2000. Only now migrant traffic was coming through some of the most pristine wildlands in the country—including many lands protected by federal laws in the United States and Mexico. On federal protected lands in Arizona, arrests rose astronomically between 1997 and 2000, from 512 to more than 110,000. The National Park t h e w a l l | 1 3 7 Service estimated that 200,000 undocumented migrants entered Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in 2001, compared to scattered minimal traffic in the early 1990s, prior to what the Clinton administration called, “Operation Gatekeeper.” The new approach clearly did not solve immigration issues, which only worsened as the Mexican economy continued to falter. But what this federal border crackdown in San Diego did do was create a whole array of unintended negative consequences. The government’s new enforcement policy flooded what had been quiet, mostly unpopulated lands with many thousands of people seeking passage north. Because of the increased difficulty of migrant travel, a...