The new construction will span 27 miles across the valley, around 20 miles east of Nogales. The valley is a unique ecosystem surrounded by “sky island” mountain ranges, distinguished for hosting a greater diversity of reptiles, mammals and certain insect species than anywhere else in the United States.
A July report from the Center for Biological Diversity says the wall would “inflict irreversible damage” on species including jaguar, pronghorn, ocelot, gray wolf, bighorn sheep and black bear.
In areas of the U.S.–Mexico border where animal movements were cut off in the previous Trump administration, “the science is clear that the wall is doing damage,” said report co-author, Russ McSpadden, describing the new wall as a “landscape-level modification that will rewrite the evolutionary future” of the San Rafael Valley.
To enable the wall’s construction, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has waived 34 separate environmental and preservation laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Noem is granted these powers through a clause in the REAL ID Act of 2005 enabling the D.H.S. Secretary “to waive all legal requirements as necessary to ensure expeditious construction of certain barriers and roads at the U.S. border.”
In a statement in the Federal Register announcing the waivers, Noem wrote that the “project area” for the new construction is an “an area of high illegal entry” and that there is “presently an acute and immediate need to construct additional physical barriers.” Border Patrol Encounters of irregular migrants in the Tucson sector are down 91% since the beginning of the new Trump administration, and environmental groups claim that crossings in the San Rafael Valley were already much less frequent than in other parts of the sector.
The Sky Islands Alliance maintains 60 wildlife cameras in the San Rafael Valley, finding an average of five human crossings per month since 2020, including Border Patrol agents and hikers. Remains of migrants who die while attempting to cross the border recorded by the Pima Country Medical Examiner show a much lower density of migrants in the valley than in other Tucson sector regions including the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument or the section between Sasabe and Nogales.
“The idea that this is this site of mass people pouring across the border: it’s just not happening,” said McSpadden, pointing to the valley’s isolation from paved roads as making it less suitable for migrant crossings.
The new length of wall is being constructed by Fisher Industries at a contract price of $309 million. In the previous Trump administration, Fisher Industries received $2 billion in border wall contracts. The section of wall in the San Rafael Valley is of a similar design to these previous sections, with six-inch-wide 30-foot steel bollards in a continuous concrete footing, topped by a solid steel panel.
Environmental groups including the Sierra Club, Sky Islands Alliance and Wildlands Network have called for new sections of wall to include additional design features to enable wildlife crossings. This could include additional monitored wildlife gates, or widening the gap between steel bollards to six inches from four.
These features were not present in the 30m demonstration wall seen during my visit to the site. A request to D.H.S. for elevation drawings of the full wall length had not been responded to by time of publication.
One significant change has been made, however. In August, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the entire border wall would be painted black, “specifically at the request of the president,” so that it “gets even warmer and it will make it even harder for people to climb.”
Visiting less than a week after its construction, pieces of that black paint were seen to be already peeling off. “It’s a dog and pony show” Tim Foley,the leader of a border “vigilante” group in Arizona, of Noem’s directive. Foley has long called for stronger border security, but called the paint directive “propaganda”.
In three hours at the new wall on 20 September, I saw only the site security guard and one Border Patrol truck, among cattle, mating butterflies and a wild tortoise. The guard, who did not wish to give his name, said he was glad the wall was being built: “high fences make good neighbors”.
