It is a wall made up of kilometers of containers, stretching between the United States and Mexico, disfiguring a magnificent natural landscape in a region whose biodiversity is one of the richest in North America.

After a legal battle, this rudimentary barrier, an assembly of metal parallelepipeds, will be dismantled.

In all, no less than 915 containers were stacked and placed end to end, like giant dominoes, in a valley deep in the Coronado National Forest, a federally protected area that serves as habitat for endangered species like ocelots. and jaguars.

To be collected before January 4

The idea of ​​using these partly rusting shipping containers to form a 6.4 kilometer wall came from the office of the Republican Governor of the State of Arizona, Doug Ducey.

The project, meant to stem the flow of migrants crossing the border illegally, cost the taxpayer $90 million.

The news of the dismantling fell on Wednesday.

Doug Ducey, who is due to leave office at the start of next year, therefore finds himself with the obligation to clean up: the agreement, concluded with the federal authorities, mentions that his administration must withdraw before January 4 "shipping containers and associated equipment, materials, vehicles, and other objects on lands owned by the United States in the Coronado National Forest."

The justification given is “to prevent damage to land and resources”.


$95 million dollars for Ducey's shipping container wall vs 15 seconds of climbing.



Dumb-ass Ducey 0, Climber 1



Video by Eric Meza pic.twitter.com/HiHoa0H8kN

— Russ McSpadden (@PeccaryNotPig) December 14, 2022

Access to this content has been blocked to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on "

I ACCEPT

", you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I ACCEPT

And to better remunerate 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our "I accept for today" button in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Management Policy page.



simple wire fence

“The biodiversity of this region is incomparable,” confirmed to AFP Russ McSpadden, of the Center for Biological Diversity, an organization for the defense of the environment.

His association has twice taken legal action against the wall of containers, a legal fight which has added to the standoff between the State of Arizona and the federal power.

Arizona shares approximately 600 km of border with Mexico, a country through which thousands of migrants from Central America and the Caribbean transit each month in search of a better future in the United States.

Before 2017 and the arrival at the White House of Donald Trump, who had made illegal immigration one of his main campaign themes, the border in this region was not so visible.

It consisted of a simple barbed wire fence with wooden posts, surrounded by cacti.

Elsewhere, under Trump, long stretches of a modern wall were built, about nine meters high, but without connecting the west coast to the east coast as he had promised.

And the border remains porous - a playground for smugglers who know its flaws well.

The container wall is far from these transit areas and the only migrants it stops are animals that need to come and go to survive, say its critics.

No passage of migrants

Russ McSpadden explains that he placed automatic cameras in the corner.

“I have never recorded a passage of migrants with these isolated devices,” he says, specifying on the contrary to have had proof of the existence of jaguars or ocelots.

“We are in a wild valley.

There are no nearby urban areas.

It is a very difficult border region for a migrant,” continues the activist.

“That's why even under Trump they didn't build a wall here.

He considers that Doug Ducey's wall is a "political artifice" intended to make him appear as a firm official on the immigration file and which, moreover, could turn against his successor, the Democrat Katie Hobbs, who will be criticized for "reopening the border".



Seen on the spot, the wall seems in any case badly designed from the start: on the portions of uneven ground, the containers cannot be joined, leaving gaping spaces through which a man would have no difficulty in slipping through.

And, in a video that has gone viral, a man demonstrated how easy it was to climb the six-meter height formed by two superimposed containers with his bare hands.

World

The United States ready for an “extraordinary” influx of migrants at the Mexican border

World

United States: A governor deports migrants to a posh island on the east coast

  • UNITED STATES

  • Migrants

  • Mexico

  • Borders

  • Immigration

  • Illegal immigration

  • World