Trump’s border wall was as terrible for the environment as critics said it would be
A new report found that construction of the barrier caused serious harm to cultural and natural resources while failing to stem the tide of migrant crossings at the border.
The top congressional watchdog group on Thursday released a damning report on the damaging effects of former President DONALD TRUMP’s southern border wall as House conservatives threaten to shut down the government if Congress fails to allocate billions of dollars to resume construction of the barrier.
The Government Accountability found that from 2017 to 2021, federal agencies built around 450 miles of barriers along the southwest border in an expedited process that included waiving federal environmental and other laws.
The construction resulted in harm to cultural and natural resources while failing to stem the tide of migrant crossings at the border.
“This report lays bare the incalculable damage border wall construction inflicted on wildlife, public lands, and indigenous nations,” LAIKEN JORDAHL, Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement to Supercreator News. “These border walls haven’t done a thing to address immigration or smuggling, but they did drive endangered species closer to extinction, butcher thousands of iconic saguaro cacti, and dynamite indigenous sacred sites and burial grounds.”
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for president in 2024, has committed to completing the wall if reelected next year. Additionally, his immigration plan would extend Texas’s controversial floating barriers in the Rio Grande a lower court ruled unconstitutional before an appellate court blocked the decision on Thursday.
“[The report] is a clear warning that any attempt to build additional miles of border walls would be a horrifically destructive and useless folly.”
But the House Freedom Caucus has made the wall a red line in the upcoming debate in Congress over government funding. The faction of about three dozen far-right Republicans vowed last month to oppose any short-term funding bill to keep the government open beyond the Sept. 30 deadline that excludes anti-immigration legislation the House passed in May that would restart construction of the barrier.
“September is National Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month,” Rep. ELI CRANE (R-Ariz.) said in a post on X, the app formerly known as Twitter. “As we head into this government funding battle, I urge my @HouseGOP colleagues to stay vigilant and not lose their backbones this time. #NoSecurityNoFunding.”
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GAO added that the Department of Homeland Security assessed some potential effects of the construction before building, but federal officials and stakeholders said they failed to receive sufficient information from DHS to offer meaningful feedback.
The watchdog agency found that the impacts on natural resources fell into five categories: (1) cultural resources, (2) water sources and flooding, 3) wildlife migration and habitats, (4) vegetation and invasive species, and (5) erosion.
“From the start, President Trump’s border wall was nothing more than a symbolic message of hate, aimed at vilifying migrants and bolstering extreme MAGA rhetoric,” Rep. RAUL GRIJALVA (D-Ariz.), the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee said in a statement. “This racist political stunt has been an ineffective waste of billions of American taxpayers’ dollars—and now we know it has caused immeasurable harm to our environment and cultural heritage as well.”
Despite the damage, Grijalva added that the US has the opportunity to prevent future harm through environmental restoration and mitigation work that centers science along with the tribes and border communities impacted by immigration policy.
“So many corners were cut in building the wall—let’s not repeat history by cutting corners in repairing the damage it caused,” he said.
The GAO made three recommendations that the agencies affected agreed with, including that Customs and Border Patrol and the Interior Department document a joint strategy to reduce resource impacts from future wall construction. The group also called on CPB to evaluate lessons learned from its assessments of potential cultural and natural resource impacts of barrier construction at the southern border.