Donald Trump has been repeatedly tweeting a single image that he promotes as showing how fast “the wall” is growing. That image appears to show a section of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, an area where less than five miles of already-existing barrier has been replaced by Trump’s intentionally uglified fence. That barrier already crosses ecologically sensitive areas of a monument that is also a UNESCO world biosphere preserve, and the tall fence ruins the view of some shockingly beautiful, untouched desert lands. But as the fence expands, it’s also moving through areas that contain not just plants and animals found nowhere else, but at least 60 sites containing artifacts and remains of people who lived in the Sonoran Desert up to 10,000 years ago—and those are just the sites found in a single five-day field review of the proposed site for the border fence.
The National Park Service report (pdf), obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post, looks at just 11.3 miles along the southern boundary of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. In this relatively small area, archeologists on the team identified materials from the Hohokam, Patayan, Trincheras, and more modern Native American peoples, along with artifacts and homesteads of early European settlers. A single previously unmapped site along this line produced over 400 stone artifacts and 100 fragments of pottery. Sites contained fragments of marine shells brought into the area through trade networks, and several sites appeared to contain artifacts that had been undisturbed over an extended period. Details on some artifacts recovered were redacted from the report to help prevent these sites from becoming the target of black-market collectors.
If it were any private or state agency doing development in such circumstances, it would be required to wait for the analysis of these sites, which may include extended excavation, mapping, and recovery of artifacts. But things being the way they are, it appears that the National Park Service is hurrying to complete this report while sections of the fence are actually going up. It is unclear that the operation will be halted, or even delayed, to honor the protections provided by the American Antiquities Act.
Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is one of several areas over which lawsuits have been filed to halt expansion of the fence and carry out an environmental impact review. Similar lawsuits have been filed in neighboring Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. The wall across the two adjacent areas would extend for 43 miles, acting as a huge barrier to the movement of wildlife in a region where resources are sparse and animals have expansive ranges.
But at this point it doesn’t appear that any court has intervened to halt development of the barrier in this area. The Washington Post has reported that this area is central to that part of the wall that Trump is demanding be completed before Election Day 2020, and federal workers in the area are “feeling extraordinary pressure” to keep construction moving forward at all costs.
Including, apparently, the loss of historic artifacts that record the people who lived in the region 4,000 years before the pyramids were built in Egypt. In an effort to please Trump, workers are both damaging an environment that will not recover for centuries and destroying archaeological sites that date back millennia.
But then, you can’t build a fence across a nation and not expect to destroy everything in its path.
