The border wall is going up, and all of a sudden, the open borders crowd is concerned about the environment again

 

By Monica Showalter

Without much fanfare, President Trump has restarted his work to construct a border wall, and it hasn't taken lefties terribly long to suddenly claim it's bad for the environment.

According to The Guardian:

Donald Trump is forging ahead with a new section of border wall that will threaten wildlife in a remote area where many rare animals – but very few people – roam.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has invited private sector companies to bid for contracts to erect nearly 25 miles of barrier on the US-Mexico border, across the unwalled San Rafael Valley south of Tucson, Arizona, one of the most biodiverse regions in the US.

Here, vast rolling grasslands stretch across high desert, hemmed in to the east and west by rugged, isolated mountain ranges known as sky islands because they rise abruptly and spectacularly out of the arid flatness.

“This is a crucial wildlife corridor,” said Eamon Harrity, wildlife program manager for the Sky Island Alliance, a conservation non-profit, while driving along a dirt road towards the cottonwood tree-lined Santa Cruz River that flows towards Mexico.

Funny, they didn't have that concern before, when more than 10 million illegal border crossers were marching through, leaving these kinds of environmental disasters:

Image: Screen shot from ABC 15 Arizona, via YouTube

According to a 2018 report from the Center for Immigration Studies, Arizona is probably the hardest-hit state:

Perhaps the state hardest hit by trash at the border is Arizona, which shares 370 miles of border with Mexico. Behind only the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Tucson, Ariz., is consistently the sector of the border with the highest number of Border Patrol apprehensions.

The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) estimates that over 2,000 tons of trash are discarded at the Arizona border every year. As a consequence, the department established a website entitled "Arizona Border Trash" in 2012 to coordinate and keep track of the state's trash cleanup operations. According to ADEQ, each ton of trash requires landfill fees of $37 to $49, which are footed by Arizona taxpayers. That does not include fees for materials, transportation, or labor. ADEQ further estimates that each border-crosser leaves an average of six to eight pounds of trash behind.

According to the ADEQ website, border trash "has been shown to affect human health, the environment and economic wellbeing." Included among the specific impacts are watershed degradation, soil erosion, damage to infrastructure, loss of vegetation and wildlife, and escaped campfires.

CBS News reported last year that the Tucson corridor, which includes the San Rafael State Natural Area, the game reserve named in The Guardian report, was the busiest and most trash-filled illegals' crossing point. You can bet a lot of trash has already been left behind by illegals in the absence of a border wall.

Oh, but The Guardian has that covered! They said it was sparsely traveled, presumably, by people. 

This Google map shows where it is on the lower right:

The boundary of the San Rafael Natural Area does go to the Mexican border. But notice also that Mexico doesn't have an adjacent park for these animals, meaning, they aren't exactly protected when they cross over the border to the Mexican side. Maybe a border wall would actually protect them.

The other thing is the claim that the place has no environmental problems because nobody crosses there. But a map of border deaths of illegal border crossers tells a different story.

Here is a downloadable Google map of border deaths using official data put out by a group called Humane Borders:

It's true the numbers are not as high as those to the west of the Natural Area. But there are many deaths, the bulk of them during the period of Joe Biden's open borders, about three or four a year, mostly of exposure to the elements, and that's the bodies that have been found -- the Customs and Border Patrol's "Missing Alien Program" website indicates that many are not found.

Where people die, people are crossing, and if people are crossing, you can bet there's a lot of trash left behind, too.

Which rather blows apart the lefty argument that a border wall is a health hazard to the wildlife the comes and goes. The animals have already had their health hazards with the mass illegal immigration crossings, which could get worse for the San Rafael Natural Area if a wall goes up near the more crowded crossing areas to the west and the human traffic is pushed east into the San Rafael Natural Area. A full wall would solve the problem once and for all.

The call to halt the border wall construction based on the animal needsw is nothing but a questionably sincere quest by NGOs to reopen the border to human traffic. As for animals, if it's really that important, which I don't think it is, there's no reason cat doors can't be installed in some walled areas, which are too small for people to get through and which can be monitored for non-animal activity. The wildlife will easily find it.

What we have here is hypocrisy: Leftists only care about the environment when walls go up, they said nothing when millions were crossing, littering, and destroying the natural landscape. At this point, one can only hope that their pathetic claims are ignored. We all know how little they care about the environment in the wake of Biden's border surge.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/05/the_border_wall_is_going_up_and_all_of_a_sudden_the_open_borders_crowd_is_concerned_about_the_environment_again.html