In one of the most remote parts of Arizona, a place where most of the residents are nonhuman and life in all its forms is abundant, something big is coming. Construction trucks power through the meandering dirt roads, breaking the silence of a wildlife corridor that sees few visitors who aren't hunters, hikers, or law enforcement.
Construction has begun on 27 miles of border wall along Arizona's southern border, through one of the last intact prairie grasslands in Arizona.
The wall will be going up in the San Rafael Valley between Nogales and Naco, a remote part of the state, two and a half hours south of Tucson, and at least an hour from any public businesses.
The work began in earnest in August, with the Trump Administration waiving environmental laws to expedite the construction, leaving environmental advocates pushing for a solution that could keep at-risk populations in the area from being lost forever.
The construction has led to a small city of RVs, trailers, and multi-ton equipment making a new home just feet away from the existing southern border, mostly ranch fences alongside upright X-shaped Normandy fencing to stop vehicles from moving through.
This is the place where the Trump Administration will be working for the next two and a half years to connect existing border wall. Overall, it will be a $309 million investment, ending with a 30-foot-tall steel wall slicing through the Sky Island wildlife corridor.
The project is one of the first steps by the second Trump Administration to build up the border wall as quickly as possible. In a release announcing the construction contract, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) describes the Tucson Sector, which covers 262 miles of border in Arizona, as "an area of high illegal-entry attempts" that "experiences large numbers of individuals and narcotics being smuggled into the country illegally."
As a whole, that's historically an accurate description of the area. But the Tucson sector is one of the most active sectors along the U.S./Mexico border, and includes major crossings in places like Nogales. The new project announced by the Trump Administration, cutting through the San Rafael Valley, is just 27 of those miles, and according to wildlife experts, illegal crossings in the area are exceedingly rare.
"We know this is a landscape where very few people are crossing," explains Eamon Harrity, wildlife program manager with Sky Island Alliance.
The Tucson-based nonprofit works to try to protect wildlife, water, communities, and land in southern Arizona and northern Mexico.
Sky Island Alliance's cameras catch only about five people every month in the region where the wall is being built. Of those five people, half appear to be recreating in the wilderness or members of Border Patrol.
ABC15 asked CBP for data on how many people it has tracked moving through this specific region. The agency did not respond to any of our three emails about the issue.
On Sky Island's many wildlife cameras, which have been recording the area for the last five years, life is abundant and ripe for observation.
Sitting in his office, Harrity points to one of the videos on his computer.
"That's a mule deer, see how easily they're able to move through?" Harrity says, looking at a video of a mule deer crouching to pass through the wire ranching fence along the border. "And if we compare that with the border wall, it's a little bit different."
In the second video, the mule deer and its fawns wander aimlessly in front of the wall, blocked entirely from getting to the other side.
This land is busy with all kinds of animals, including javelina, coyotes, pronghorn, black bears, mountain lions, and even extremely rare and endangered jaguars.
"I think a lot of us have pets at home that can't get through a space like that," Harrity says, referencing the many videos he's seen of wildlife stopped from reaching their habitats on the other side of the border. "So, if you extrapolate out, you're talking about anything larger than a bobcat is impeded and completely blocked by this wall."
In order to build the wall quickly, the Trump Administration waived environmental protections for the project, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of a proposal before making a decision on a project.
Harrity, who has spent nearly a decade studying Southwest wildlife and endangered species, says impacts in the region will be immediate.
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"These animals depend on resources that are scarce. They depend on water. They depend on food that is kind of scattered around the landscape, so they need the ability to move freely. And yet this border wall will stop them in their tracks," he explains. "You live across the street from a store, but suddenly they rip up the road, and you have to drive all the way around the block to get across the street. Now, imagine that, kind of, at a much grander scale."
In the past, the federal government has introduced environmentally friendly solutions to try to accommodate the needs of wildlife while still continuing with border wall construction. Solutions can be as simple as adding small wildlife passages to the base of the wall's bollards. The passages, which are roughly the size of a piece of binder paper, allow small animals like coyotes, javelina, and bobcats to pass through.
Spacing could also be increased between posts. Current border wall designs require bollards to be placed every four inches. Through Sky Island's research, however, it's been found that every once in a while during construction of the wall, these bollards are placed further apart by accident, creating a gap closer to 5.5 inches. Researchers have placed trail cameras at these anomalies, finding that wildlife had a much higher chance of passage with the increased spacing.
It's still "much too small for people," Harrity points out, but still incredibly effective at allowing wildlife to move. And it could save American taxpayers money, too.
"They'd save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, across the scope of this project to increase the spacing just a little bit, because you'd need fewer posts," Harrity adds.
Gates, meant to allow for monsoon rains to pass through the landscape, have also been built in the past. When the gates aren't opened, or the gates are never built in areas with a high likelihood of monsoon flooding, the wall gets knocked down.
"Happens pretty frequently, actually," Harrity says. "So these gates have the potential to allow animals that are much too big for the small wildlife passages through."
CBP did not answer ABC15's requests to clarify how they planned to protect the ecosystem within the San Rafael Valley. Groups like Sky Island plan to keep pushing for solutions through litigation and direct advocacy.
"I think it's natural to want to close spaces, but it's also, you're not considering, a. what it costs, and b. what the impacts are," Harrity says. "We're really good at breaking things and leaving the mess for future generations. We do it all the time. I think this is another example of just breaking things and leaving a mess for future generations to deal with."
