Our Worst Fears about the Border Wall Come True

By Stefanie Herweck

More human beings would die alone in remote deserts. Endangered species would be pushed to the brink. These were the fears that led humanitarians, environmentalists, and border residents to object to the walls along the U.S.-Mexico border called for by the Secure Fence Act of 2006. With 650 miles built, this summer has brought news that these fears are tragically coming true.

The journey taken by migrant men, women and children who set out across the U.S.-Mexico border has always been risky. But border walls have rerouted migrants away from the safety of urban areas and forced them to walk for greater distances over treacherous mountains and through searing deserts. All too easily they can become fatigued, dehydrated, and unable to go on. In too many cases, they die alone in remote areas.

This month an Arizona Daily Star analysis found that migrants today are almost three times more likely to die on their journey than people who crossed in 2006, the year before the walls began to go up. In fact, the rate of death—the number of deaths per 100,000 Border Patrol apprehensions—continues to increase even as fewer people are making the trek across the border.

Before the walls, in 2006, there were just 46 known deaths per 100,000 Border Patrol apprehensions. By 2010 the number had jumped to 118 known deaths per 100,000 apprehensions, and so far 2011 already has a death rate of 129 per 100,000.
These human beings are also dying deeper in the desert and much further from roads than ever before. Because of the remoteness of the areas in which they die, many of the bodies discovered are just skeletal remains. Such are the real and tragic consequences of border walls.

The same walls that are pushing crossers deeper into deadly terrain slice though nature preserves that were established to protect endangered species. The Otay Mountain Wilderness Area, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, and Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge have seen critical wildlife habitat divided by walls. Environmentalists have argued that vulnerable species like the ocelot, whose U.S. population is less than 100 individuals in South Texas, would be walled off and trapped in small fragments of habitat. Without sufficient food, water, and potential mates, the population would dwindle.

Now scientists are beginning to uncover just how extensive the wall’s impacts are likely to be on endangered species. A recent article published in the journal Diversity and Distributions found that border walls impact 23 endangered species border-wide. Some species in California are blocked from as much as 75 percent of their ranges, a circumstance that makes the isolated populations extremely vulnerable to disease or natural disasters. The study also found that in South Texas border walls impact between 60 percent and 70 percent of the habitat set aside for endangered ocelots in the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge.

In 2008 the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recognized that the border wall had damaged wildlife refuges along the border, and Congress appropriated $50 million to mitigate the effects of the wall border-wide. Money was promised to the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge to purchase land to replace the ocelot habitat that the border walls fragmented. But after DHS withheld the money for years, Congress took back the funds. DHS has no further plans to fix any of the environmental damage that its border walls have caused.

As predicted, the border wall has exacerbated the ongoing humanitarian crisis of migrant deaths and has devastated the environment. Nevertheless, some in Congress are calling for more walls and looking to strip border communities of their environmental protections under the pretense of border security.

Dan Millis has witnessed first-hand the human tragedy and environmental devastation unfolding daily along the U.S.-Mexico border. Shortly after finding the lifeless body of a young girl along a migrant trail in Arizona, Dan was convicted of littering for leaving bottles of clean water along trails in the same area. He now works for the Sierra Club in Tucson fighting on behalf of the people and places victimized by border walls and enforcement-only politics.

Dan will visit Texas' Rio Grande Valley to share his experiences, and discuss the impacts of flawed U.S. border policy and how you can make a difference on Monday evening, August 22nd at 7:00 pm at Galeria 409 in Brownsville and on Tuesday August 23rd at 7:00 pm at St. John the Baptist Parish Hall in San Juan. For more information and directions, visit valleygreenspace.wordpress.com.

As border residents we need to educate ourselves about the terrible consequences of border walls and enforcement-only policies all along the border, and then inform our elected leaders.

Stefanie Herweck is chair of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Club.

Walkers Remember Migrants on Tohono O'odham Land

By Brenda Norrell

SAN XAVIER DISTRICT, TOHONO O'ODHAM NATION -- Walkers arrived at San Xavier District on the Tohono O'odham Nation on Saturday to remember the 183 migrants who died this past year in the Sonoran desert. Of those migrants, 108 were not identified. Nineteen could not be identified as male or female because so little of their remains were found. A large portion of those deaths were on Tohono O'odham land.

Walkers called out "Presente!" during the reading of the names at San Xavier, remembering those who died walking to a better life. The walk, organized by Derechos Humanos, was an 8-mile walk from Tucson, during temperatures that reached the mid 90s.

Although the elected leaders on the main section of the Tohono O'odham Nation, located to the west of here, have not welcomed humanitarian aid for migrants, the San Xavier District cohosted the Indigenous Peoples Border Summit of the Americas in 2006 and 2007. The border summits were cohosted by the International Indian Treaty Council and organized by Tohono O'odham Mike Flores.

Photos: Walkers arrive at San Xavier. Crosses carry the names of the migrants who died this past year. Photos Brenda Norrell. Please e-mail for reprint permission: brendanorrell@gmail.com

This originally appeared in Censored News: http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2008/11/walkers-remember-migrants-on-tohono.html

Art Against the Wall

By Scott Nicol

International borders are abstract concepts, little more than lines on maps that we imagine upon the earth. Existing outside of the real world of rivers, mountains, or deserts, political boundaries have no bearing on ecosystems. Ephemeral, the lines shift from decade to decade, century to century, making old maps obsolete. Still, the map and the concept that it represents are privileged over the actual landscape. The wall under construction along the U.S.-Mexico border is an attempt to impose a political fantasy upon living ecosystems, to transform a line on a map into a permanent line of concrete and steel on the land.

The border wall is meant to enforce division, to block the migration of humans based on the national boundary that encircled them at birth. Near San Diego it consists of parallel 18 foot tall steel walls with stadium lights, cameras, and a road in between. In Arizona rusted steel landing mats left over from the Vietnam War have been welded together and driven into the earth. Three hundred and thirteen miles of pedestrian walls and vehicle barriers had been built by March 31, 2008; another six hundred and seventy miles are to be built by January. Walls will slice through parks and National Wildlife Refuges, communities and businesses, farms and homes. They will stop the movement of endangered species such as the Sonoran pronghorn and ocelot, but according to the Border Patrol human migrants will only be slowed by a few minutes.

In the face of something so destructive and absurd, what role can art play?

Migrating from the campuses of South Texas College and the University of Texas at Brownsville to the McA2 Creative Incubator in McAllen, and scheduled to travel on to Monterrey, Mexico, the Art Against the Wall exhibition allows artists living along the border to address this question. Much of the work is didactic, like Monica Ramirez’ painting “International Friendship”, depicting a golden Statue of Liberty obscured by a crude stone wall with the words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…” written on its impasto surface. Oscar Martinez flirts with abstraction, using bands of paint and scraps of plywood to overwhelm a photograph of a concertina wire-topped prison fence in “Crossing the Dividing Line”. In “Anatomy of a Border Wall” Victor Alvarez and Rachael Brown digitally impose fencing onto landscapes that will soon be scarred by actual walls. These and other works in the show express a mix of fear and outrage at what the artists see as a tremendous injustice, an assault on border communities and American ideals. Political in its inception, this show and these artists want to stop the border wall.

The border wall is actually a series of walls with wide gaps in between, the first of which were built near San Diego, California in 1995. As more walls have been constructed near cities, immigrants have traveled deeper into the desert to get around them. This has lead to hundreds of deaths due to dehydration and exposure, a tragic situation that artists in Tijuana, Mexico wanted to bring to light. In 2003 they bolted coffins to the Mexican side of the border wall. Each was decorated and inscribed with a year and the number of crossers who had died that year. For 1995 the number of confirmed dead was 61; in 2000 there were 499. The artists sought to transform the border wall into a graveyard, a memorial to the dead that its construction had caused.

Like the graffiti that covered the West German face of the Berlin wall, the placement of the coffins both undermines the border wall’s authority and protests the authoritarianism that brought it into being. Removed from the art world of galleries and museums, they occupy the real world where people risk their lives to enter the United States, and where military means are marshaled to stop them. They are both a warning to crossers and a reproach to the United States. Affixed to the border wall the coffins become part of the reality of the wall, mediating the perception of the wall of those who encounter it. But they have not stopped further construction. Three years after their installation, and two weeks before the U.S. midterm elections, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act of 2006, calling for more than 700 miles of border wall modeled on the barrier from which the coffins hang.

The transformation of the map’s depiction to the reality of miles of walls is currently underway. Can more art reverse this conjuring trick? During the Spanish Civil War, with Franciso Franco attempting to overthrow Spain’s Republic and install himself as dictator, artists were commissioned to make work that would rally world opinion behind the Republican government to stop Franco’s advance. Pablo Picasso’s epic “Guernica”, with its chaotic disfigurement of humans and animals, was a reaction to the bombing of the Basque village of the same name in which 1,600 civilians died. The chaos of Picasso’s composition was meant to capture the raw terror felt by Franco’s victims as they desperately sought shelter. It has shaped our perception of the event and of Franco’s brutality, but it did not prevent him from taking Spain from democracy to fascist dictatorship.

A reproduction of “Guernica” hangs in the United Nations beside the door to the Security Council chamber. In 2003, when Colin Powell made his now infamous presentation to the UN Security Council laying out evidence for the invasion of Iraq, “Guernica” was covered with a blue banner. The United States did not want the backdrop for the call to war to be a depiction of the horrors of aerial bombardment. Picasso’s painting was viewed as a threat to the control of the message. In the intervening years support for the invasion of Iraq has plummeted, from 90% of Americans in favor of the war to 70% opposed. This dramatic shift was not the result of a single news report, act of protest, or work of art. It is the accumulation of all of these that has inexorably pushed the national debate.

The artists of the borderlands who seek to stop the walls hope for a similar result. Whether images on gallery walls or coffins on the border wall itself, the goal is to shape the conversation, moving it from the xenophobia and “broken borders” rhetoric of CNN’s Lou Dobbs to the lives and landscape that the border walls destroy. It is the art of engagement, addressing the world and addressed to the communities that these artists live in. Their hope is that the rest of the nation will engage in this dialogue and perceive the border walls as they do before more is lost.

This article originally appeared in Voices of Art magazine.

Chertoff Pays the Price of the Border Wall in Human Lives

By Scott Nicol

In 2007 a U.S. district court ordered a halt to construction of the border wall through the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff responded to the ruling, “I have to say to myself, ‘Yes, I don’t want to disturb the habitat of a lizard, but am I prepared to pay human lives to do that?’” He then waived 19 federal laws, using the unprecedented power granted him by the Real ID Act to override the judge’s order, and immediately resumed construction of the border wall through the last free-flowing river in southern Arizona. This past April he issued another Real Id Act waiver, which swept aside 36 federal laws to enable the construction of walls called for by the Secure Fence Act along the southern border.


Secretary Chertoff’s statement was intended to mislead the American people into believing that the environmental damage caused by border walls is the necessary cost of protecting U.S. citizens. When confronted with a “lizards vs. humans” choice, anyone with warm blood will defend the latter. Establishing this false dichotomy is therefore a great way to marshal support for the border wall by demonizing border wall opponents as wanting to sacrifice human safety and national security to protect animals. But it is a lie, and Chertoff knows it.

While the walls built along the U.S./Mexico border since the 1990s have done tremendous environmental damage, they have not saved any human lives. Chertoff cannot point to a single terrorist who has attempted to cross the U.S./Mexico border, much less one turned back by a section of border wall. It has not even reduced the number of undocumented immigrants who enter the country each year seeking work. Four months before Chertoff claimed that if we do not build walls we must be “prepared to pay human lives,” the Congressional Research Service issued a report which found that the border wall “did not have a discernible impact on the influx of unauthorized aliens coming across the border.”

The border wall has instead caused thousands of deaths. In 2006 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked at the border wall’s human toll since the erection of the first California sections in the mid 1990s. They found that, though the number of border-crossing deaths had been declining in the 1980s and early 1990s,

“Since 1995, the number of border-crossing deaths increased and by 2005 had more than doubled. […] This increase in deaths occurred despite the fact that, according to published estimates, there was not a corresponding increase in the number of illegal entries. Further, GAO’s analysis also shows that more than three-fourths of the doubling in deaths along the southwest border since 1995 can be attributed to increases in deaths occurring in the Arizona desert.”


This increase in deaths occurred because the border walls did not stop people from entering the United States, they only rerouted them. Confronted with an 18 foot high wall near San Diego, desperate immigrants did not turn around and go home. They went around it. Rather than crossing in safer urban areas, thousands instead came in through the desert. As a result, more than 5,000 have died from dehydration and exposure, and it is estimated that thousands of bodies lie undiscovered.

The GAO report revealed that funneling immigrants into the desert was not accidental, but intentional. “The strategy assumed that as the urban areas were controlled, the migrant traffic would shift to more remote areas where the Border Patrol would be able to more easily detect and apprehend migrants entering illegally. The strategy also assumed that natural barriers including rivers, such as the Rio Grande in Texas, the mountains east of San Diego, and the desert in Arizona would act as deterrents to illegal entry.”

The GAO concluded, “The increase in deaths due to heat exposure over the last 15 years is consistent with our previous report that found evidence that migrant traffic shifted from urban areas like San Diego and El Paso into the desert following the implementation of the Southwest Border Strategy in 1994.”


These findings were presented to Secretary Chertoff long before he lied to the American people to justify his Real ID Act waiver. Fully aware that existing border walls have caused thousands of deaths, he has decided to erect more walls.

And the decision is entirely his to make. Last year’s supplemental appropriations bill contained a provision which gives Secretary Chertoff absolute discretion as to whether or not to build walls along the border. It changes the Secure Fence Act’s text to read, “nothing in this paragraph shall require the Secretary of Homeland Security to install fencing, physical barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors in a particular location along an international border of the United States, if the Secretary determines that the use or placement of such resources is not the most appropriate means to achieve and maintain operational control over the international border at such location.'' With ample evidence that the border wall is causing thousands of deaths without slowing the influx of undocumented immigrants or enhancing national security, it should be easy to make that determination.

The border wall does not present the United States with a choice of either saving the environment or saving human lives. The wall takes a terrible toll on both. The real choice is whether or not to build more walls, knowing that if more walls are constructed they will do irreparable environmental damage and cause thousands more to die.

Until Congress acts to amend or repeal the Secure Fence Act and the Real ID Act, only Secretary Chertoff has the power to make this decision. The language in the Omnibus bill gives Secretary Chertoff the power to decide whether or not more border walls are built. The Real ID Act gives him the power to suspend our nation’s laws to build walls that would otherwise be illegal. Numerous reports have spelled out how many people have died, and how many more are likely to die, as a direct result of the border wall. In the face of all of this, Secretary Chertoff continues to build walls. In legal terms, this is a premeditated act, because he knows what the result will be. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has decided that to build the border wall he is in fact “prepared to pay human lives.”