S2E6: Border Chronicle: Biden Still Building Trump's Border Wall

Uncorrected Transcript

[0:00] Music.

[0:29] Hey, welcome to 90 miles from needles, the desert protection podcast. This is Chris.
For this week's episode, we wanted to bring you a little bit of reporting from the border chronicle, which is a fantastic podcast and email newsletter combo put out by border journalists Todd Miller and Melissa Del Bosque. In this episode, Melissa talks to border activist Scott Nichol, an artist, educator and environmentalist living in South Texas who has advocated against border wall construction for years, Scott will be talking about the continuation of Trump border wall construction by the Biden administration, labeled as something else entirely. This is all despite President Biden's promises during his campaign that, and I quote, not another foot of wall, end quote, would be constructed during his administration.
We hope you find this sampling of the Border Chronicles work useful. You can subscribe to their newsletter or their podcast at theborderchronicle.com.
Be sure and stay with us until the end of this episode because we've got some important news to share about the future of this podcast.
Thanks for listening, and here's the Border Chronicle.

[1:37] Music.

[1:50] Listening to The Border Chronicle. Between the state-funded shipping container walls and the Biden administration quote-unquote filling in the gaps of Trump's border wall, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on.
What we do know is that border wall building under the current administration has not stopped.

[2:08] Even if the Biden administration calls it something else.
Scott Nichols, an artist, educator, and environmentalist in South Texas who has advocated against border wall construction for many years and is an expert on the subject.
In this Border Chronicle podcast, Nicole talks about the current construction of wall on his community, which is being labeled as levee repairs.
And he touches on wall construction in other states still being built, despite President Biden's promise during his campaign that not another foot of wall would be constructed during his administration.
Well, as we know, President Biden ran his campaign with a promise that he wouldn't build another foot of Trump's wall, but that's not what happened.
In fact, construction, border wall construction started up again.
I think the first place in the country it started was there near your home in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas.
I'm hoping you could talk about what's going on there now with border wall construction and sort of what you're seeing on the ground. Sure.
So in Hidalgo County, which is in the Rio Grande Valley sector for the border patrol.

[3:22] We were supposed to get the pause and work did stop for a few months, following Biden's proclamation that was meant to, you can't halt the work entirely.
It requires Congress rescinding the appropriations for the president to be able to finally put, you know, all of that to rest.
But we did have a few months of no work going on. But then by May, levee border wall construction had fired back up in Hidalgo County.
And, you know, I could see this on the ground. It was pretty obvious if you went out and saw big cranes, as actually we did when you came down.

[4:06] And it was kind of really driven home once I was able to see the documents that the Center for Biological Diversity was able to get through FOIA.
Yeah, and I'm hoping you can talk about that. So the Center for Biological Diversity, which is a nonprofit, they got several hundreds of pages right through Freedom of Information requests that really gave you some insight into what was happening behind the scenes.
Can you talk about what you saw in those documents?
Sure. So apparently, the Army Corps of Engineers is using the idea of levy repair as kind of a front or an excuse to basically keep building the same walls that were being built under Trump.
So during the Trump administration, you had preexisting levies with the river facing side carved away. That was replaced with a concrete slab up to the height of the old levies.
And then another 18 feet would be put on top of that, that would be steel bollards, the same kind of things that we see in Arizona and other parts of the border.
And so the total would be 30 feet tall. When some of the local politicians complained that in a small number of places, construction had stopped without fully restoring the levees to their old state, making it so that if we.

[5:35] Did get a big flood, communities would be protected.
That apparently was seen by the Army Corps and the contractors that they hired as a green light to just build the same old border walls.
They could have fixed those places in such a way that they just looked like they had before any damage had been done.
Instead they gave the contractors the go ahead to build them as they were designed when the border wall contracts were let out.
And then after that work was completed, they gave contractors the go ahead to build another 13 miles under the pretense that these are places that have been damaged.
But in many cases, these are places that hadn't been touched.
And in those documents, there are even instances where locations where the federal government didn't own the property, so they couldn't set foot on it, much less do any damage to Even in those locations, contractors were given the go-ahead to convert old levees into new levee border walls.

[6:42] And why is it, do you think, that they've done that, that they've continued this construction, even though the Biden administration said that they were going to stop it?
The why is a little bit tough to nail down because it's not in the documents, essentially.
I mean, in the documents, there is the pretense that these are levees that were in need of remediation, that they were damaged. But last fall, the Army Corps of Engineers' own levee Safety Committee looked at all of those places and was asked to evaluate whether or not they needed to be rebuilt, restored to their old state, turned into new border walls or whatever.
And their recommendation was to just basically engineer them so that they looked just like they had before.
For some reason, the Army Corps of Engineers ignored that and continued to claim that it was a safety concern.

[7:41] They've been very adamant about the idea that this is not building any new border walls, that this is still consistent with the Biden administration's not another foot border wall promise.

[7:54] But they've built mile after mile that are being funded with border wall appropriations that can only be used for border walls.
They're still relying upon waivers of laws that only apply to border walls.
Same contractors, same contracts, and the same design.
So even though the claim is being made that this is for remediation of levies and safety for communities, that doesn't really hold up. But why they're making that claim is hard to say for sure.
It's just not in the documents.

[8:26] So there's like this weird gas lighting, right, for border communities because administrations like, we're not building any border wall, but then you're literally looking at them constructing border wall, but they're calling it a levy, like levy, wall or what are they calling it?
They're saying it's levy remediation. They kind of leave the whole wall thing out of it, but the design is identical.
Um, you know, there's no difference whatsoever, except that they made the bollards that go on top a little shorter.
Like they literally took the 18-foot bollards and cut them down to six feet.
But that's still on top of a 15-foot tall concrete slab. So a slightly shorter border wall is somehow not a border wall anymore.
Yeah. And can you talk about the state-funded border wall now with Greg Abbott having won re-election for governor and he's really been pushing, you know, state-funded border wall construction and Operation Lone Star and all this other stuff.
What is the latest with the state?
So they've announced a number of locations.

[9:35] They did do some construction a while back. Now they're pushing for more.
The latest announcement really looks like it was timed for the election.
It'll be interesting to see whether or not those go forward.
And they're using leftover bollards from the paused border wall construction that the feds were going to do.
So if they build them, they'll be identical to the old border walls that Trump was building.
But it's, you know, the whole idea is so completely politicized.
If, right now we have more border walls than we've ever had in US history and apprehensions that are an all time high. So the walls aren't stopping anything.
They're causing all kinds of environmental damage.
They're causing people to reroute into much more dangerous areas.
And the number of recorded deaths of border crossers has been going up and up and up, which is horrifying.

[10:36] But border walls don't do what they're supposed to do. So the only reason to build them is political.
It's red meat for MAGA Republicans.
Right. And I think what a lot of people don't understand, especially where you live down in the Rio Grande Valley, is that a lot of these walls are built as far as a mile inland, right?
So when asylum seekers and migrants present themselves, they just go to the south side of the wall and wait for border patrol agents to come, just as they do in other parts of the country as well, right?
Because the wall's not directly on the border. It's inland, actually.
Yeah, they can't put the wall in the floodplain. That would be a treaty violation.
Would get a big flood and they'd get washed away. And that's what's eventually going to happen to the, we build the wall stuff that was built directly on the riverside.

[11:37] But the Trump walls that are 30 feet tall and the Abbott walls that are going to go up presumably, those basically are a beacon.
People that want to turn themselves into the border patrol see that towering above the trees and they know that that's where there's going to be an agent.
And so they walk to it. doesn't stop anybody. They walk up to it and they wait patiently to be processed.

[12:02] And what's happened to all of the land that's south of these walls?
Because a lot of that is like protected federal park land, and it's sort of just been left in disrepair, right?
Since these walls were built?
Yeah. I think the border walls do a huge amount of damage to the National Wildlife Refuge that runs along the river in South Texas.
They do habitat fragmentation. And so animals like ocelots that need to be able to travel through this refuge system are cut off.
They're basically blocked from going from one piece of habitat to another.
So their habitat is constrained and that's largely what's driving ocelots and a lot of other species to extinction.
And they also cause drainage issues in places where there aren't any levees.
So you get into Star County upriver, there's no levees there, they're building walls in the drainages where there are arroyos that cross right by them or right through them.
They dam up water just like they have in Arizona and those are going to both cause erosion and damming issues.
They're eventually going to get washed away.

[13:20] And they make it really difficult for land managers to even access.
So the land managers have to get in and out if they're going to see how things are going, fight wildfires, anything like that.
And their access is severely constrained by these walls that are going up.
Yeah, I've also talked to some water district managers too, and I know that their access to the river is south of the wall actually, which doesn't seem like the brightest idea to have your water supply access south of a wall that is not easy to access.

[14:01] Yeah, it's a huge problem because down here, all of our drinking water comes out of the river. All of our irrigation water comes out of the river. So, you know, the folks that need to get to the intake pipes for those systems, whether it's municipalities or private landowners who have farmland along the river, you know, their access is going to be constrained.
You know, they can hope that the federal government works with them better than they have in the past, but so far, there have been a lot of reported problems of people who need to be able to get to the river not being able to get to the river.
Yeah. And, and this construction that the Biden administration is doing, has that also started up in other parts of the, the border in other states?
Yes. I mean, the pretense is very different, but, you know, in Hidalgo County, it's claimed that they're saving us from floods.
In Arizona, there's talk about filling in gaps, kind of gaps in quotes, basically places where there were walls planned, but then when the pause came down, work stopped.
And a lot of those gaps are crucially important for wildlife connectivity.
So if you've got jaguar habitat or ocelot habitat or any number of terrestrial animals.

[15:30] That need to be able to move north and south, the wall blocks them.
And any gap that they can get through, that makes it a little bit more viable for them to have enough habitat to survive.
You fill those gaps and their habitat is cut in half.
There's not going to be a restored jaguar population in the United States if all the gaps are filled in Arizona.
It's also a big problem for flooding. A lot of those gaps were places where they were going to put flood gates across drainages and washes and streams.
And those gates have failed year after year.
There are numerous examples of border walls blown out by flooding after the flood gate wasn't opened or didn't work and the water dammed up, blew out the border wall.
That happens again and again. And so filling in those gaps with a failed design that's just going to get blown away eventually and then cause all kinds of damage downstream, it's completely ludicrous.
And again, it's being done for political reasons.

[16:40] The Biden administration doesn't want to fight back or push back against this narrative that these gaps represent some kind of existential threat to the United States.
So they just kind of shrug and do what the Republicans ask of them, but they're not getting any political benefit for it anyway.
You know, they're just too afraid to really fight back.

[17:00] Yeah, it drives me crazy when I see mostly the Republicans make a big deal about these gaps, as if it's some existential national security crisis.
Those gaps often are there because they require a much more complex engineering kind of solution that they haven't really been able to tackle or come up with.
Yeah, and the pretense that, like, oh, we have to fill the gaps, we're going to be invaded if we.

[17:36] Don't, those are places that have never had border walls before.
So we've managed to survive this long. We're not going to lose our country or whatever kind of ridiculous right wing rhetoric they want to toss out if those gaps aren't filled right away.
It's like, we'll be fine.
Right. And now I want to segue into shipping containers, which is the latest iteration of border wall construction where we saw Governor Abbott in Texas, build this shipping container wall in Eagle Pass right on the river, which I'm pretty sure is totally contrary to the treaty with Mexico in terms of management of the flood plain.
And now we have Arizona's Governor Ducey building this double tier shipping container wall in the middle of a national forest?

[18:37] Yeah, and I think those are being done basically for the same reason as building other walls.
It's just a political prop.
The idea that those will have the claimed effect is ludicrous.
Abbott's been putting those up, Ducey's been putting those up.
Have they seen any kind of big drop in apprehensions?
Has the supply of opioids suddenly dried up?
It's like no, they have no effect, at least in terms of the claimed effect.
They have tremendous negative effect in terms of environmental impacts, impacts on human beings that are coming through the border. They're terribly destructive.

[19:20] But as far as a cost benefit analysis going, there is no benefit.
Yeah, so what's your guess? What do you think the next thing will be?
What will they try to use next for border wall construction?
If you had to guess.
Yeah, if they run out of shipping containers, I mean, who knows?
But it's all about spectacle.
I mean, that's the big thing. It's just spectacle. So, you know, if.

[19:46] If they weren't able to fire up their base, if they weren't able to get, you know, Fox News out there, they wouldn't bother.
You know, that's ultimately the way to to have these go away is for, you know, Fox News viewers to see some other squirrel and watch that and ignore the shipping containers.

[20:07] Right. But meanwhile, what kind of impact does that have on your community and on the environment and everything else?
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the thing. They're not going to move them. So it's just like all the old border walls that were built under the Bush administration. They throw up hundreds of miles of wall, and then those keep getting knocked over, cut through, fall down, and they keep spending millions of dollars to repair them. But they can't ever admit that it's a failure.
So they can't stop building them. They can't stop inflicting damage upon the borderlands.
And it's a mistake to believe that the Democrats will do any different than the Republicans, right, when it comes to border wall construction, because we've seen it go up under Bush, under Obama, you know, under Trump, and now under Biden.
Yeah, I think the, you know, the big difference is enthusiasm. So Republicans are enthusiastic wall builders. And Democrats just do it because they're trying to avoid a fight, even though they always lose on that point.
So, you know, the enthusiasm level's not necessarily there, but that doesn't mean they're not gonna keep building walls because they always have.

[21:18] So what advice do you have for Democratic officials on how they could push back against this.

[21:26] Narrative that the border's in crisis and under invasion? What should elected officials be saying?
Well, elected officials should basically stop seeding the narrative. They're allowing, Republicans and Fox News to spread complete falsehoods about the border and about the the border walls, they should push back when Republicans say, you know, we have to fill gaps, we have to build walls.
If we don't, we're going to be overrun.
You know, we're not being invaded. You know, the fentanyl isn't coming between the ports, it's coming through the ports and through the mail.
You know, they can, they could push back with facts. I think they are afraid that they won't be able to win that argument, but if they don't even try, then they lose by default.
And I think it's also important to just do the right thing, to not just see it through a political lens and to say, look, we're causing tremendous harm to border communities.
We're building walls when we say we're not building walls. There were land condemnations that continued even after the pause hit.
There have been walls that have gone up through wildlife refuges, through private property, after we're pretending that we're not building any more walls.

[22:49] So you know, like they could do the right thing for the right reasons and spell out what they're doing and why they're doing it.
You know, it's clearly not working very good for them to just hope that the issue will go away.
You know, there's...

[23:06] The whole construction of the wall down here, the levee border wall, levee remediation kind of farce, really shows what happens when the administration is not focused on the issue.
It's not even clear that Biden or the people in the White House know that this is going on.
It's entirely possible that the Army Corps of Engineers is just telling them it's levee remediation and they go, Oh, okay, well, if you say so, you know, that isn't showing up in the documents. And, you know, they should, they really, there are people who are in the administration, and this is their job, they should be keeping an eye on this stuff. They should be pushing back when they have, you know, Border Patrol, putting out false narratives, especially the Border Patrol Union. They need to be much more actively engaged. And they need to not Just think of it through this completely politicized lens.
Think about the people who live on the border as actual people.
And think about the people who are coming across the border as actual people.
What is the policy? What are the actions that really respect the humanity of all those people?

[24:28] Right. And now we're seeing, actually, a lot of deaths from people falling off the wall, right?

[24:35] Yeah, and I think that's something that, you know, Democrats should be able to point to and say, look, coming across the border without proper documentation is a misdemeanor.
You know, people shouldn't die for a misdemeanor.
If we are putting in place policies and we are putting in place infrastructure that kills people when the thing that we're supposedly protecting against is so minor, maybe we shouldn't do that.
Maybe the moral thing is to find a different route, to find, especially when you're talking about asylum-seeking families, find ways for them to just walk across a bridge or through a port of entry and present themselves and go through a bureaucratic process instead of having, you know, basically an arm of the military, or at least people that think of themselves as an arm of the military, use tactics that are killing so many people.
Right. Well, thank you so much, Scott, for speaking with us today at the Border Chronicle. I really appreciate it.
Sure. Thanks for being on top of this. It would be. It'd be great if all of the major news outlets that used to pay attention were paying attention still.

[26:00] Music.

[26:12] The Border Chronicle is reported by Todd Miller and Melissa Del Bosque based in Tucson, Arizona.
This interview was edited by me, Lily Clark. If you like what you're hearing, please consider rating us on your favorite podcast platform. It'll help other people find the show.
You can read and listen to more local border reporting on our website theborderchronicle.com.

[26:33] Music.

[27:35] Thanks to Melissa Del Bosque and Scott Nicole and Todd Miller for the use of their intellectual property in this episode. The Border Chronicle is well worth your attention and you can subscribe to them at theborderchronicle.com. We wanted to let you know that Alicia and I have been wrangling the whole spare time and day jobs and bandwidth and podcast production demands, And as you may have noticed, we've had a little trouble getting episodes out on a timely basis for the last month or so.

[28:12] This problem is getting better, but what we've decided to do with the long-term goal of being able to work on this podcast in a sustainable fashion is to establish ourselves as a nonprofit and then solicit larger grants and things like that.
And things like that, in addition to the extremely valuable and absolutely crucial smaller donations from members of the general public.
Establishing ourselves as a nonprofit is not something we undertake lightly.
It's a significant demand in terms of paperwork and time.
It'll probably take a few months to get established. We're in the process of putting together a diverse board of directors to provide wisdom and guidance and reality checks every now and then, and we look forward hearing from you about what you think a direction for a non-profit desert protection news organization could be. You can reach out to us at 90milesfromneedles.com. Click on the contact us link to send us a message.
Click on the donate link to send us some money. You can use Patreon, which provides a little bit of swag after you've been donating for a few months. You can use GiveButter, which provides you with no swag, but we get 100% of what you donate as opposed to about 72% from Patreon.

[29:27] Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago we got an email from listener Chris Frausto who wrote, Dear 90 Miles, Thank you for your very informative and engaging podcasts. I care so very much for our desert lands that I have found myself brought to tears hearing some of your coverage.
I would like to make a request. Could you please say something at the end of each episode that is positive? Saying something that has transpired that is good or something positive that has come about due to an episode. I have found that I am sad, almost depressed when I finish an episode. We all can only do so much. We do our own little part if we can, but I am feeling overwhelmed with the challenges we face in our deserts. The tone of the podcast episodes are so very serious that I want a nice balance of something good at the end.
Thanks for listening.

[30:17] Chris, I couldn't agree more. And I'll tell you that this is something that in my own work life I have been contending with for the last 30 years or so. Pretty much every publication I've put together, every media source that I've worked for, there's just a lot of bad news out there and we have a duty to report on some of it. Obviously, we got to pick and choose and curate what we report on because there are only so many hours in the day. But I've been coming up against this, how do we fulfill our responsibility but not completely demoralized people conundrum for decades. And I think your idea of having some good news at the end of each episode is a fantastic one. I am implementing it as of now. So here's some good news. We have some episodes that are coming up that are almost entirely good news. An upcoming episode on the establishment of the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in Southern Nevada. An episode interviewing a creative campaign called Save Our Springs, led by native people in the California desert. And coming up very soon in a matter of days, an episode in which Alicia and I visit a beautiful, beautiful patch of full bloom old growth desert Lily Forest and we decompress. There is no doom scrolling in that episode.

[31:46] Thanks to Chris Frausto for bringing this up, reminding us that all is not horrible, and that just like we have an obligation to report on the bad stuff coming down, we also have an obligation to report on the good stuff.

[32:01] Music.