The Department of Homeland Security’s expansion of the border wall has been sparking controversy for years — and now there’s a new round of objections centered on an apex predator.
This month, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) blasted open a mountain in Arizona’s Coronado National Memorial, a federally protected wilderness managed by the National Park Service. DHS plans to use the blast debris for concrete to build 27 additional miles of the border wall.
The construction work threatens this federally designated critical habitat for endangered jaguars, according to environmental groups like the Center for Biological Diversity. Jaguars are extremely rare in the United States, and often criss-cross along the U.S.–Mexico border. Earlier this month, trail cameras spotted jaguars in this area. Other species that occupy this corridor of land include ocelots, bears, and mountain lions.
In early December, environmentalists traveled to the site to record the blasting. They hope to spark renewed debate over the impact of the border wall’s construction on native wildlife.
“This wall is being ripped through a living landscape that’s vital to endangered animals and plants,” said Russ McSpadden, who filmed the destruction for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’ll fracture jaguar migration routes, choke genetic diversity and wipe out the natural connections that have shaped the Sky Islands for millennia.”
Bypassing Environmental Protections
Most of the time, protected lands managed by the National Park Service would be considered off-limits to development.
That’s why two environmental groups — the Arizona Center for Biological Diversity and CATalyst — sued DHS earlier this year to try and prevent the blasting in Coronado National Memorial, calling the move “unconstitutional.”
But DHS waived dozens of environmental rules for the construction, including the Endangered Species Act. The agency cited a Clinton-era law from 1996 that allows bypassing legal requirements in order to build border walls. A lawyer for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said the department can “waive all legal requirements that such secretary, in the secretary’s sole discretion, determines necessary,” the Arizona Capitol Times reported.
Jean Su, an attorney for the environmental groups, said that DHS’s use of the 1996 law amounts to “unbridled — and unconstitutional — delegation of legislative authority.”
“The Arizona Border Wall Project would essentially be the death knell for jaguars in the United States, eliminating over 53 years’ worth of jaguar conservation efforts,” Su told the court.
When The Washington Post interviewed the environmentalists recording the blasting in the national memorial, they were fatalistic about the future of the area: “It’s our task to document this for history,” said Myles Traphagen of the Wildlands Network. “That’s about all we can really do now.”
