The federal government’s recent push to build a barrier along the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park got me thinking about the widespread impacts of border wall construction on transboundary waterways. “Border fence construction has been taking place along the U.S-Mexico border since 2006 under the Bush administration,” according to “Impacts of Border Wall Construction: A Hydrologic Study” by Gila Goodwin.
In the 20 years since, barrier construction has wreaked havoc on regional water systems because these fences and walls “have to cross dozens of rivers along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico,” according to Matt Weiser in his article titled “Trump’s Border Wall Could Have Lasting Effect on Rivers, Water Supply,” published in 2017. “Water supply, water quality, flood control, wildlife and groundwater recharge are all at risk [because these barriers] … block many rivers and streams … restrict water flow important to farms and cities on both sides of the border … worsen water pollution and lead to flooding disasters,” he writes.
Barrier construction cripples rivers and streams because it “bisects numerous ephemeral and perennial channels which is likely to cause substantial hydrologic and geomorphic impacts as a result of stream flow obstruction,” writes Goodwin. The resulting “low-magnitude flows will continue to alter the watershed for decades,” she warns.
Bob Irvin, president of American Rivers, an environmental group, describes the wall as “a dam that parallels” the Rio Grande. “[I]n a storm event … you’re going to have … rushing water and debris that’s going to pile up against that wall … And you’re just going to have a constant problem with debris piling up and impeding the flow of the river … And when you change the flow of a river, you’re changing the natural cleansing mechanisms of that river” and potentially impacting hundreds of streams and creeks along the border. The view from Arizona is particularly instructive. Here, the federal government built a barrier right through the San Pedro River, “one of the few perennial streams that flows from south to north—out of Mexico and into the U.S.,” according to Irvin, effectively walling off the American side from these life-giving waters.
Some of the most acute effects on water have been felt during construction of the wall itself. In a 2021 article in Popular Science titled “How the Trump border wall sapped a desert oasis dry,” Lucy Sheriff describes how “[t]he 450 miles of border wall in sections of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas have already required more than 971,000 tons of concrete.” In southern Arizona’s Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, home to a rare desert pond system known as Quitobaquito Springs, a “30-mile-long spine of steel poles filled with concrete” required “some 84,000 gallons a day” by Customs and Border Patrol’s own estimates, writes Sheriff.
The pond system “dropped to its lowest levels in years after pumping began for the border wall” because the contractors failed to respect “a five-mile buffer around the spring and its pond,” according to Ariana Brocious of High Country News. In her article titled “After months of border wall construction, a look at the damage done,” Brocious reports that CBP withdrew 45 million gallons of water to build the wall, resulting in damage that “scientists and Indigenous communities fear may take years, if not decades, to reverse,” according to Sheriff.
Construction-related water impacts have also been reported at Arizona’s San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, where contractors drained the area’s rare “artesian-fed wetlands and springs” by pumping “water from deep belowground for construction purposes, wetting roads to keep the dust down or to make cement,” according to Brocious. Documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity “revealed that nearby groundwater pumping for the border wall—as much as 700,000 gallons per day—was depleting the refuge’s wetlands,” she writes. Construction crews have also been “dynamiting, drilling, pumping, excavating and clear-cutting public land. In places like Guadalupe Canyon in far eastern Arizona, simply building roads to bring in construction equipment involved blasting mountainsides and sending the rubble down to clog drainages,” according to Brocious. The Center for Biological Diversity’s Randy Serraglio has described these impacts as “damage that will not ever be remediated or mitigated. This is permanent.”
All of this activity is particularly troubling because it’s occurring in some of our country’s most fragile arid landscapes during a period of widespread drought and record-high temperatures. The webs of desert streams and rivers in the borderlands need more flow, not less, and the waters of Texas are no different. In an evolving situation, the CBP’s apparent decision to deploy “detection technology” in Big Bend National Park seems intended to allay fears of a border wall through the region. But the health of the Rio Grande remains under threat from the proposed construction of physical barriers in Big Bend Ranch State Park and other areas. Based on the known consequences of barrier construction elsewhere and the simultaneous availability of highly effective surveillance technology, the time has come to reconsider the wisdom of walling ourselves off from the water that sustains us.