President Trump’s border wall scarred the environment, but so did President Biden’s order to halt all work, according to a report Thursday, which said the new administration ended up stopping all remediation work planned to repair the lands.
Erosion has become so bad that it “is now undermining the integrity of the panels that contractors installed,” according to Congress’ Government Accountability Office.
The problem was the breadth of Mr. Biden’s 2021 order stopping all wall activities. The contractors put down tools and walked away, leaving miles of unfinished wall, as Mr. Biden intended. They also stopped working on all the planned remediation, such as installing drainage culverts and repairing flood plains to control erosion.
“In multiple locations in Arizona, we observed erosion occurring adjacent to the border barrier along patrol roads where contractors did not complete installing culverts and other erosion control measures when projects were paused and contracts were ultimately canceled, threatening the integrity of the barrier system,” GAO said.
Investigators said they found the same problem at sites in California, where erosion is “undermining” the wall.
House Democrats asked GAO to look at the overall environmental impact of the wall, and investigators found plenty of issues of concern.
They dinged the previous administration for running roughshod over environmental laws, skimping on collaboration with state, local and tribal governments and wreaking havoc on the land by carving habitat for wolves and ocelots, draining scarce water sources, disturbing birds’ migratory routes and destroying sites that were culturally important to American Indians living along the border.
Mr. Biden’s construction halt made some of the problems worse.
In one troubling example, GAO investigators said contractors building sections of the wall in Arizona had to move a bunch of saguaros — the iconic cactus with arms pointed to the sky that grows only in the Sonoran desert — out of the way.
Contractors transplanted the saguaro nearby and nurtured them. When Mr. Biden took office and ordered a halt to wall activities, that meant an end to tending the cactus, according to an official from the Tohono O’odham Nation, which has occupied border lands for centuries.
“As a result, the official estimated that as many as half of the transplanted cacti did not survive in some locations,” GAO investigators said.
At a location in Texas, GAO investigators found that contractors had cleared a space to stage equipment and were supposed to reseed the land when they left. Mr. Biden’s construction halt blocked the repairs, and invasive species have taken over the site.
In New Mexico, a contractor built a road against the wall but 8 feet above the flood plain. Now, water pools against the base of the wall rather than flowing into Mexico.
Under Mr. Trump, the feds erected 458 miles of barriers. Of that, 87 miles were built where no previous barrier existed, 176 miles were built where outdated fencing existed, and 195 miles were built where there was a vehicle barrier but no fencing.
A lot of the construction was on federal lands, including in some of the country’s most pristine desert wilderness.
The Tohono O’odham Nation said the feds used explosives to clear the way for constructing a road next to the wall. Road infrastructure is a critical part of the wall system.
The explosives damaged part of Monument Hill, a burial site and religiously significant location for local tribes.
In Texas, construction has fractured the habitat of the ocelot, severing migration corridors and elevating the risk of the ocelot’s extinction in the U.S., GAO said.
In Arizona, the demand for water at one site was so heavy that contractors drained groundwater stocks, which dried up ponds on the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge. Those ponds are home to some endangered and threatened species, GAO said.
The administration is making plans for restoration work, but Mr. Biden’s actions are hindering that, too.
In addition to halting wall work in 2021, he canceled the national emergency Mr. Trump had declared and used to tap Defense Department funds. Without a national emergency, the government can’t waive certain laws. That means the administration must undergo an environmental impact assessment before starting repairs.
“In the meantime, CBP officials said that conditions at some of these project sites continue to diminish. For example, they noted that erosion at one site in California — made significantly worse due to high amounts of rainfall — is now undermining the integrity of the panels that contractors installed,” GAO said.
CBP has set aside $50 million for environmental repairs, but GAO said that won’t cover all the needed work.
Mark Morgan, who oversaw wall construction as head of CBP in the Trump administration, said his agency made the right choices.
“We applied a common sense balanced approach in an effort to address environmental concerns while prioritizing our main goal of securing our nation’s border to reduce a vast set of complex threats from entering the U.S.,” he said. “Speaking personally, if we disrupt a butterfly habitat or a few cacti die in exchange for disrupting the cartel’s operational capacity to threaten our nation’s safety and national security, I’m OK with that trade-off.”
In its report, GAO urged CBP and the Interior Department to develop a better strategy for caring for cultural and natural resources endangered by wall construction and to study lessons to be learned from the last round of wall-building.
The departments agreed with all of the recommendations.
“DHS remains committed to coordinating with stakeholders regularly to ensure environmental planning for projects is inclusive and comprehensive,” Jim H. Crumpacker, the Homeland Security Department’s liaison to GAO, said in an official response.
The White House did not respond to an inquiry for this article.
GAO pointed out some positive impacts to the environment from the wall. It has reduced the amount of trash that migrants dump onto the lands and the number of footpaths they cut as they traipse through wilderness deserts, land managers said.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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