By Scott Nicol
Donald Trump’s election is a national tragedy, and based on his campaign rhetoric the next four years will be an environmental disaster. It will be up to Sierrans and our allies to halt as many of his destructive moves as we can.
There is no time to mourn. It is time to organize and to resist.
Topping Trump’s agenda is this promise from his campaign kick-off speech, “I will build a great great wall on our southern border.” This was a crowd favorite at his rallies, causing him to repeat it ad nauseum.
Of course, we already have hundreds of miles of wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Far from “great great,” the existing border wall has proved an abject failure, as the ever-replenishing pile of ladders beside the wall 12 miles south of my house attests. While they have not stopped people, the walls that repeatedly slice through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife refuge do halt the movement of the terrestrial animals that the refuge was created to protect, especially federally endangered ocelots.
Ladders stacked against the border wall in South Texas
To build those border walls, the George W. Bush administration waived 37 federal laws, including the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
Two days after the election, Rudy Giuliani told CNN that Trump could begin building walls immediately without waiting for Congress to pass new legislation. The Congressional Research Service subsequently confirmed that Trump has all the legal authority he needs to erect new border walls.
The REAL ID Act, which gave President Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security the unchecked power to waive any and every law to build border walls, is still in effect, granting Trump’s DHS Secretary the power to issue new environmental waivers.
Those new walls, totaling hundreds of miles, would mostly be in Texas.
Border wall through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge
In the Lower Rio Grande Valley (where I live), there are now 56 miles of border wall broken up into 18 disconnected sections. Customs and Border Protection had planned to build an additional 14 miles of wall through the South Texas communities of Roma, Rio Grande City, and Los Ebanos, as well as adjacent U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuge lands.
Those 14 miles did not go up because for years the U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission said that walls could not be built in the Rio Grande’s floodplain due to our treaty with Mexico. Neither country can build structures that could deflect flood water and thereby exacerbate flooding on the other side, and possibly even cause the river to settle into a new channel, moving the border.
But after years of pressure, in 2011 the U.S. IBWC reversed its position on these walls, and Customs and Border Protection has already condemned the necessary land.
Other parts of the border will require planning and the condemnation of property, which can take years. All they need to start construction in and around Roma, Rio Grande City, and Los Ebanos is an order from the top. If walls are to go up, they will be hit first.
The Lone Star Chapter, along with other border state chapters and the Borderlands Team, have been fighting against border walls and waivers for a decade. Now, with the threat of new walls looming, we will have to redouble our efforts.
Scott Nicol co-chairs the Sierra Club’s national Borderlands Team and serves on the Lone Star Chapter’s Political Committee and the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Club’s Executive Committee. For more information about the environmental impacts of border walls visit sierraclub.org/borderlands