In February, bulldozers carved long straight lines, uprooting trees and scraping the earth bare, near the South Texas communities of Salineño and Roma, the start of the first new border walls built during Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House. The routes for these walls were mapped, and funding was provided by Congress, during Trump’s first term. Waivers issued at that time exempt this construction from the local, state, and federal laws that would otherwise protect the environment and local residents. Just like these new border walls, none of the hundreds of miles built since 2008 had to comply with these laws due to a provision of the federal REAL ID Act. These waivers have had real-world impacts.
Near the city of El Paso, for example, the Tiguas of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo feared that border walls would cut off their access to religious sites on the Rio Grande and “irreparably alter the sacred character of the land.” Rather than address their concerns, construction was exempted from the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Along the river’s final stretch, border walls repeatedly slice through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, fragmenting a natural corridor set aside for endangered ocelots and uprooting endangered plants. With the Endangered Species Act (and dozens of other laws) waived, this ecological destruction was largely ignored by wall planners and builders.
The following chapter is excerpted from Walled, a new book edited by Andréanne Bissonnette and Élisabeth Vallet, and it tracks the application of waivers as walls have gone up from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. While “restoring the rule of law” to the U.S.-Mexico border has been a resonant and repeated talking point for successive administrations, it is the border walls that they have built, not the border itself, that are lawless.
