The Border Wall Is Outliving Trump
Republican officials continue to see immigration as a campaign issue, and in Arizona state legislators hope to use between fifty and seven hundred million dollars of public funds for additional barrier construction. Photographs by John Kurc
Myles Traphagen kept his eye on the horizon as he maneuvered his pickup truck down a treacherous sand road in Cabeza Prieta, Arizona’s largest wilderness area. Bordered by Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to the east, Cabeza Prieta sits on the state’s southwestern edge. The preserve, which was founded in 1939, is known for its beauty and its desert wildlife, which includes Western diamondback rattlesnakes, Sonoran pronghorn, and lesser long-nosed bats. It is, according to the National Park Service, the “loneliest international boundary on the continent.” Looming mountains, some made of lava, others of granite, cleave the rugged land. They give Cabeza Prieta its name—Spanish for “dark heads.”
Halfway down a road leading to the border with Mexico, Traphagen stopped his truck. A burly man of fifty-four, with thick brown hair and a scruffy beard, he raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “I think that’s it,” he said. Traphagen was pointing to a winding dark line that, from a distance, looked like a stain on the earth: the border wall. “It’s like you come down here to see it and then you don’t want to see it,” he added. A biologist by training, Traphagen has spent the past four years mapping the four hundred and fifty-eight miles where the Trump Administration erected a wall from Texas to California—a barrier that he warns is having a disastrous impact on the environment. “Animals have been migrating through this route for tens of thousands of years,” he said. “If we cut off this population, we’re essentially altering the evolutionary history of North America.”