Biden and the Future of Trump’s Border Wall

Portions of the wall built under the Trump administration could be torn down, Evers said, especially due to maintenance costs which could outweigh the benefits of a wall that does not stop immigrants or drugs from crossing the border.

“Walls require maintenance and if there is construction that is wasteful and requires continued spending of American taxpayer money, it should be removed,” Evers said.

An email request to Biden’s transition team seeking information on his plans for the border wall was not returned by press time.

Seeking reparations

For Native American tribes whose ancestral lands were bisected by the U.S.-Mexico border, the focus has turned away from preventing irreparable damage to cultural, historical and burial sites by construction to discovering what damage has been done and what kind of reparations can mitigate them.

Michelle LaPena, a partner with tribal law firm Rosette LLP, represents the La Posta Band of Digueno Mission Indians, a San Diego tribe which challenged border wall construction cutting through Kumeyaay land in San Diego.

A federal judge, backed by the Ninth Circuit, found the tribe was not entitled to a preliminary injunction of ramped-up border wall construction in the Otay Mesa this fall, even though tribe members and archaeologists said human remains were believed buried in the project area.

The tribe had asked for Border Patrol agents to use cadaver dogs to detect any human remains along the length of the border but the government declined, LaPena said.

“They didn’t want to use cadaver dogs because they didn’t want to find it, they wanted to move forward as quickly as possible,” LaPena said, noting construction crews began working through the night once the tribe filed its lawsuit in August.

LaPena said since the Ninth Circuit denied the tribe’s bid to stop construction earlier this month, a cremation site was discovered as was a large prayer circle feature filled with quartz crystal.

Construction has been paused at the cremation site in El Centro, but construction has continued tearing through the prayer circle, which LePena said could been seen on Google Earth.

While the Biden administration will inherit the La Posta tribe’s legal challenge — along with dozens of pending border wall challenges — LaPena said the tribe is hopeful to begin settlement negotiations with the new administration.

“Regardless of the litigation, the impacts to tribal cultural resources along the border wall infrastructure have occurred. The impacts have happened, such as with the prayer circle, and now the question is how do we mitigate that?” LaPena said.

“I would hope with the new administration we could use the settlement process to begin a meaningful conversation about the future. Litigation will not resolve all these issues.”

LaPena said the government’s argument that tribal cultural sites have already been damaged by prior border wall infrastructure does not mean the government should be off the hook for the mitigation of damages this time around. She compared tribal cultural site restoration to environmental restoration for wetlands and tidelands.

“There’s no reason these cultural sites can’t be treated in the same way. The idea would be to avoid further harm and have a program in place to ensure the harm doesn’t occur again. To me, that seems to be common sense,” LaPena said.

Laiken Jordahl, a borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, has personally documented ramped-up border wall construction in Arizona this year.

He said the former 3-foot vehicle barriers in the Arizona desert have since been replaced with 30-foot-tall steel bollard walls which provide no gaps for migrating wildlife to pass through.

The environmental group has sued the Trump administration half a dozen times over its environmental law waivers to prevent damage to wildlife, Jordahl said.

“At the core of the issue is people and wildlife at the borderlands are not receiving the same protections as other people across the country and that is fundamentally unjust,” Jordahl said.

“The government has no authority to waive laws anywhere else. It’s tragic communities at the border are not protected by the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Act, and Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which have been brushed aside to make way for Trump’s despicable pet project,” Jordahl said.

While the long-term effects of the wall cutting through migratory paths are not yet fully known, Jordahl said pictures of mule deer “dead in the shadow of the border wall” suggest there has already been negative impacts on animal migration.

“At the very least we will need to take sections down in important migratory corridors for wildlife,” Jordahl said, adding, “Once we do consult with scientists and work with wildlife biologists on both sides of the border, that will help us assess just how much of the wall needs to come down.”

Border future

Yet some border infrastructure has been sorely needed for some time: The ports of entry are relics that are showing their age — and inefficiency.

Everard Meade, director of the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute, agreed the Biden administration will first be tasked with remediating environmental and cultural site damages caused by border wall construction. But Biden’s approach to border security will likely build on the Obama administration’s historic investment in modernizing the San Ysidro Port Entry in a bid to broker some bipartisan deals in the House and Senate.

“There’s not a lot of bipartisan issues around the U.S.-Mexico border, but one where there ought to be is modernizing ports of entry,” Meade said.

He pointed the broad coalition of support in San Diego when it comes to modernizing port of entry infrastructure to more efficiently and safely move goods and people traveling for work, school and shopping between the U.S. and Mexico.

And he touted the historic public-private partnership which facilitated the opening of the U.S.-Mexico pedestrian airport crossing and San Diego’s involvement in the brokering of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement as successes that “have nothing to do with the border wall.”

“I tend to think what Biden will do instead of focusing on building new borders in wilderness areas will be to invest in ports of entry,” Meade said. “The port of entry is a good story, it’s something that Biden wants. He said he wants practical people with governing experience, who can work across the aisle.”

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